peep – St Ninian's Primary School

Nursery News

What a busy week for St Ninian’s nursery!

Our boys and girls are really embracing our new word boost words and trying hard to understand them. There have been lots of lovely thoughts and ideas of what words mean and how they sound, this is growing week by week! The word boost words for this week were;

CREAK

DISCOVER

GIGGLE

SHIVER

Please support your child’s learning at home by using these words regularly and encouraging them to be adventurous with their vocabulary 🙂

Moving on from the word boost work this week – the children showed interest in making words and letters out of wool. Some children even moved on to using the sounds they know to spell out the word ‘LUV’ – fantastic ways to experience and experiment with early phonics!

Our welly wednesday was a focus on finding signs of spring on the back of the very UN-Scottish weather we have experienced this week (which has been a welcomed delight!). We found lots of green shoots and some pockets of colour that made us very happy! We also had a chat about picking flowers after seeing some had been picked and left lying.. we decided to rescue them and bring them back to nursery to put them in water! We seen a duck wandering through the trees which sparked lots of questions; what is it doing? Where is it going? More than all of this – we continue to learn to be responsible in our local environment on Welly Wednesday – taking opportunities to keep ourselves and others safe.

On Thursday we had a great time working with P5 in gym where we were learning to make baskets with our hands to catch a various assortment of items. We love working with P5 and learned a new term ‘underarm throw’, when we threw things back to our friends in P5.

Friday always comes around too quickly – but we went to the hall and had fun being dingle dangle scarecrows, using our bodies in different ways to flip, flop and wobble.

PEEP class this involved meeting our new puppet – an old lady (not Mrs Beattie…) who was telling us all about her eating habits! Swallowing spiders, flies… sounds yummy, no? We learned a Spring song and banged a big drum in time to share with everyone how special we are and our own name. We love PEEP – Bang, Bang, Bang!

Have a lovely weekend!

Nursery News

What a wonderful return to nursery we have had this week!

The boys and girls have filled our talking books with chatter about CHRISTMAS! It seems that Santa has been good to everyone – have a look in our talking books about what exciting things we got, seen and done at Christmas time!

It has been icy this week – this has led to lovely discussions about Winter/Snow/Ice. We will spend next week consulting the children so we can plan for their interests around this area. We loved throwing sticks onto the icy pond on our Welly walk on Wednesday – this led to lots of talk about what happens to water when it is cold, what happens to ice when it is warm… Super scientists! We have had ice cubes in the water tray and even painted with coloured ice cubes! Lots of boys and girls have enjoyed making winter collages this week and painting with cold colours.

We have had a reshuffle of furniture on the carpet area which has been very popular with the children – we have had so many lovely teas being made in the house corner, games being played at the games table and the garage and car mat have been well used! We will observe the children in this environment and adjust resources/spaces over the coming weeks depending on how the play progresses – it has been lovely to see so many engaged learners return from their Christmas break!

Mrs Beattie is looking forward to getting PEEP up and running for 2018! The sign up sheets will be available in the cloakroom next week with classes beginning again on 26th January.

Our parent/carer coffee morning is Wednesday 11.20-12 – please do come along as we discuss snack, food preparation and our future vegetable patch!

Have a lovely weekend!

Nursery News

An action packed week at St Ninian’s Nursery!

It was a busy start to the week with our individual and sibling photos on Monday! Our boys and girls donned their happiest smiles – we can’t wait to see the finished product!

Mr McCurdy has been the man of the hour in nursery this week after a very exciting PE session on Tuesday where the floor was lava!!! The boys and girls had lots of fun using their bodies and the apparatus to move around the hall in a safe way, taking their time and waiting their turn where needed and persevering when the going got tough! For the rest of the week the nursery has been alive with shouts of ‘THE FLOOR IS LAVA IN 3..2..1..’ – we might be able to adapt this to the outdoor area if the weather is kind to us next week?! Watch this space!

This week brought the third and last of our stories for the Bookbug awards! Mrs Campbell at Lanthorn library has read us (and P1) the three stories that are up for the bookbug picture book award! We voted for Gorilla Loves Vanilla as our favourite story! Today the AM nursery session and P1M joined together for structured play and lots of discussion about ice cream flavours! Mrs Conway loves chocolate ice cream with marshmallows through it! Mrs Martinek loves mint chocolate chip! Miss Meechan loves strawberry! But Mrs Beattie…….. she doesn’t like ice cream!!! She said she would like some cheese flavoured ice cream.. which we agreed might taste a bit strange! If you’d like to enjoy the story with your child you can watch the author read it on the link below;

Enjoy!

Welly Wednesday had us out in our local community to see what we could find. We realised we didn’t have enough cameras for everyone so we learned how to turn our eyes and brains into cameras – maybe your child can show you how?! We took ‘photos’ of interesting things we found and kept them in our brain to talk about when we got back! Some of our children knew lots about our local community;

Khyla – that’s Bankton school! That’s the pharmacy!

Emilie – you go there for medicine!

Carter – that’s a post box for letters

Luke – you go to the doctors when you have a sore tummy

Khyla – that’s the dentist, I went there.

Shay – you need pennies to get things from the shop!

We all enjoyed our snack at the Play park after our walk! We have deposited our pumpkins in the woods by the pond to be enjoyed by the creatures in the woods! We look forward to investigating them next week to see if any bugs have moved in!

Mrs Beattie is delighted to have two happy, smiley PEEP groups back this week! The parents and children enjoyed learning together as they went over, under and through different things and learned to listen to and communicate with one another. PEEP will continue next week 🙂

Sign up sheets are available for stay and play/come back and play! In the nursery cloakroom – the Wednesday slots will incorporate welly Wednesday, more information available next week 🙂 we also have sign up sheets for welly Wednesday helpers too! The more the merrier – we wouldn’t be able to run it if it wasn’t for the support of our parents and friends!

Many thanks to the parents who attended our coffee morning on Wednesday! If you couldn’t make it buy would like to share your views there are paper copies of the questions available in the cloakroom!

Have a great weekend!

Nursery News

Another busy week in St Ninian’s nursery! This week we sent the pre-school reports home on Thursday PM and Friday AM – theses are for the boys and girls who will be going to school in August and will form the basis of the discussions at Parents Night. If you haven’t got your report yet please make sure you get it on Tuesday 🙂

It is parent consultations on Wednesday and Thursday night – please make sure you have your appointment time – we have the times in nursery and can remind anyone who has forgotten!

This week in Nursery-P1 transition we had a ‘play time’ with our P1 friends in the nursery garden. Some buddies were able to join us for this. The boys and girls enjoyed having their snack or ‘play piece’ whilst playing – it will be hard for them to get out of the habit of sitting at the table having snack! It was a joy to see them playing so nicely with the P1 group in the nursery garden and we are confident this will prepare them well for their playtime in the ‘big’ playground this coming week (Tuesday AND Thursday). All the boys and girls going into P1 will take part and are asked to bring along a *small* snack – a bag of crisps, banana, small block of cheese etc. This is plenty for them to eat as they want to enjoy as much time playing as possible 🙂 thank you to everyone who brought in something for our letter ‘m’ display! We ended up with a lovely wee box of treasures 🙂

A VERY exciting week for outdoor learning this week! Mrs Mushet found……….. A FROG!!! In the nursery garden – in the wendy house. The boys and girls thought it might be scared so we popped it in a wee box to keep it safe and brought in some water and sticks from our garden ‘pond’ for it to climb on and hide under. As you can imagine this caused MUCH excitement and the boys and girls were very keen to show their parents and carers our discovery. We agreed that the PM boys and girls would love to meet our frog too so we kept it safe for them to see 🙂 Mrs Hogg then filled the water in the nursery pond a little bit more and brave Mrs McDonald lifted the frog from the box and put it gently down into the grass. He quickly hid away in the long grass and we wonder if he has a family here?

The AM group then went along to the duck pond to see if they could see any more of Freddy’s family – we didn’t find any frogs (they are super good at hiding though..) but we did see the new baby signets!

Yasmin – they are cute

Isla – they were silver and (swans) white

Freya – daddy swan is an angry man… (as he wants to keep his babies safe!)

Liam J – we shouldn’t go near to the edge or we could fall in…

In addition to all this excitement the PM group also had the first of their Almondell Trips this week! Kirsty (a forest ranger) very cleverly tied our visit into our coverage of the gruffalo – we looked for the animal characters, talked about their homes and where we might find them! We discovered there aren’t any snakes in Almondell – that we know of! The boys and girls created lovely art work by gathering bits of ‘nature’ and sticking them down 🙂

PEEP this week has been the last classes in the block of five – a new five week block will begin Friday 2nd June. Mrs Beattie is so impressed with how the children have grown, learned and laughed together 🙂

In group one this week they were having fun with bats, balloons and happy faces.

In group two the boys, girls and adults talked about what they liked during this block and spent time making adult and child hands and feet to stick on their sheets.

Can we just remind adults to take into account the safety of all our boys and girls when opening and closing gates and doors around the nursery 🙂 sometimes we are so eager to see our loved ones we inadvertently make a break for it!

Many thanks for your continued support 🙂