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Westfield Nursery: A Place to Smile

We have been learning about Chinese New Year by exploring stories, images, music and customs from China.

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On Thursday the nursery enjoyed a visit from two of the residents at Blackfaulds House Nursing Home, and their carer.

There is growing research on the benefits, to both young and old, of such generational integration.  The children and visitors enjoyed playing and listening to stories together. We are planning on Thursday visits, from Blackfaulds House, becoming a regular occurance.

The children in the nursery baked cakes to raise money for Children in Need. They mixed sugar, butter, eggs and flour together, then they spooned them into small cake cases before cooking the cakes.

Next, after the cakes had cooled a mum came in to nursery to help the children decorated their cakes with icing sugar and Pudsey Bear designs.

Lastly on Friday morning the children sold the cakes to raise money for Children in Need.

The Nursery raised £42.20 by making and selling Pudsey cakes, well done everyone!

Another busy week in the nursery started with the children collecting sticks to make a ‘campfire’. Songs and stories were shared around the ‘campfire’ and fire safety discussed.

Later in the week the learning about fire safety was extended through some messy play set up by Miss Hirst, our visiting student Teacher. The children really enjoyed ‘putting out’ the fire (red paint added to shaving foam) while discussing and learning more about fire safety.

Every week the children are learning all about food and food hygiene through helping prepare snack. The nursery staff are keen for the children to experience a big variety of food. Last week the children helped make macaroni cheese.  They examined the uncook pasta and described how to cook it.  They looked at the difference between cooked and uncooked macaroni and they added the cheese to the cooked macaroni.

This week the children enjoyed making and tasting apple pie.

The children have also been developing their pen control and artistic skills through creating self portraits. We think the look great. Please check them out in the gallery below.

This week has been a busy week in Nursery.

On Tuesday we launched our Big Bedtime Read, many of the children came to nursery in the pyjamas and brought a teddy with them.  The Big Bedtime Read is intended to help support parents to read with their children at least four nights a week, as each week they will now be given a bag with four books inside, instead of one.

A big thanks to Mrs Aitken for all her hard work organising The Big Bedtime Read. Feedback from parents was very positive and the children were excited to be receiving their book bags.

Later in the week some of the children were looking at the story “When I was Little” by Jamie Lee Curtis. They were looking at the pictures in the book and making up the story. The children were particularly interested by the page when the baby didn’t have hair, this sparked a discussion about how they looked as babies.

The children decided it would be a good idea to bring in our baby photos to see what we all looked liked as babies.

We would be very grateful if next week you could send in a baby photo of your child for them to share with us.

Over the past weeks, as part of their ‘All About Me’ topic the children been talking about where they live and their homes. They have also been discovering ways to represent their ideas and some started by making models of their homes.

On Wednesday the children were using their ITC skills and looked for their homes on Google Maps Street View. We were very impressed with their direction skills as we managed to find their homes quite easily!

We also managed to print off some pictures of their homes and we put them up at the art table for the children to create artistic representations of their homes. We think their picture look fabulous.

Over the past weeks the children have also been developing an awareness of personal safety inside and outside the nursery.

We started by encouraging the children shared their ideas on how to keep safe indoors this was recorded on a mind map. We have collected their ideas such as “Walk Safely” and put the on a ‘Our Nursery is Happy When…’ poster to help the children remember how to keep safe indoors.

Next week risk assessed the outdoor area with the children. They were asked what are the risks/dangers outside and then asked how could we make it safe.

They have great ideas such as:

‘You have to check your shoes are on the right feet or else you will Trip.’

‘Be careful on the steps, walk down them and hold on.’

‘Check the gates are shut, if they are open tell an adult.’

This week we made a ‘shoes on the correct feet’ checker, by drawing around one of the children’s feet. The children use it after changing their shoes, they stand on it and if their feet match the checker they have their shoes on the right feet.

Lastly we talked about the job of a safety officer, we looked at images of safety officers on google to see what equipment they use and what clothes they wear; hard hat, bright jacket and a clipboard with pen. The children were excited to find the right clothes and equipment in the nursery.

They quickly set about checking outdoors was safe and took on the role of safety officer.

Each day we will need one or two f the children to be safety officers and check outdoors is safe. They will check there is an adult outside, the gates are shut, they will check for ice, they will make sure no one rides a bike on the ramps and they will check we have our shoe on the right feet!

The children have been busy decorating boxes for the nursery.

The morning children chose pink and green tissue paper to cover the box and then decorated it with colourful feathers.

This Box is going to be our new nursery ‘Money Saving Bank’ and will be kept in our cloakroom. The money bank will help develop the children’s number and money skills through a practical financial experience.

We would be most grateful if you could donate any loose change into our ‘Bank’. The children will be responsible for counting the money and displaying the running total on our money ladder.

Once we have raised our target amount the children will also be responsible for deciding exactly what to spend the money on.

Our first focus for the funds will be on art materials and our first target is £20.

The children in the afternoon chose shiney blue and orange paper to cover their box, they then decorated the top with feathers, sticks, buttons and ribbons.

This box is our new comment box, and will also be kept in the cloakroom area.

If there is something you think we are doing well we would love to know. We are also open to new ideas, maybe you have heard of something a friend’s nursery are doing that you think we might like to try, if so let us know by writing your comment on  paper and dropping it in our new comment box.

The government wish to hear from parents of 0-5 year old children.

You may be aware the Scottish Government is planning to nearly double the hours of free early learning and childcare by 2020. Because the views of parents and carers are crucial for the success of this expansion, the Government has commissioned independent researchers to undertake a survey of parents.

If you have a child under 6 you can take part in the survey here 

All parents taking part will have the opportunity to be entered into a prize draw and have the chance to win one of 10 x GBP100 cash prizes.