Nursery News January 2016 Millerfield Place

NURSERY NEWS JANUARY 2016

A very happy and healthy 2016 to all of our children, parents and carers!

January has been a fun and busy month for Meadows Nursery with Forest Schools and Care Home visits and much, much more.

Outdoor Learning

We have had a great start to Forest Schools in 2016. The children have been using the small woodland area opposite Sciennes School and have really enjoyed their first session. They have loved exploring the woods, playing hide and seek and learning the rules and boundaries of being outside. Next week the children have chosen to hunt for bugs and make a den.

This session of Care Home visits now includes two younger children. Everyone really enjoyed their visit to Glencairn Care Home and the residents made us some great playdough for us when we arrived. Unfortunately, the high winds resulted in cancellation of last week’s trip, but we look forward to returning next week.

Weather permitting, we aim to go out with a group of children every day. This may be to the park, Summerhall, the museum, George IV Library for story time and Clambers. We plan to visit Clambers on a monthly basis.

Continuing Professional Development

All staff at Meadows Nursery have regular opportunities to improve their skills and have recently taken part in First Aid training and Fire Safety training. Since we are a partnership nursery (with CEC), we can also make use of the courses on offer at the Council.

Samantha has recently updated her Child Protection Level 4 and will continue to be the Child Protection officer for the nursery. Katie also completed her level 2 Child Protection.

All of the middle floor staff have recently had GIRFEC and pre-birth to three training and this will help them to improve the children’s learning and developing opportunities.

Also, the ground floor staff have all received inhouse training on the Curriculum for Excellence and planning which has helped staff to look further into the learning opportunities for the children.

Other training courses arranged for staff include The Magic of Music, Additional Support for Learners, Up, Up and Away and Language Boost. All of these courses will ensure that we are up to date on current best practice and can ensure that we are giving the children the best possible care that we can.

Diary Dates

Diary dates for 2016 are displayed in the main foyer. We hope that you can make them.

Nursery Improvements

We were delighted to come back after Christmas to our newly painted Busy Bug play room and downstairs toilet. We are now looking forward to our Garden room being painted in the next couple of weeks.

We have been going through all of our resources and replacing them where necessary. We have also looked at our room routines and layouts and are making improvements in these areas too. We really hope that you can see all of the hard work that is going on!

Children and parents

We had our first Meadows breakfast in January with several families attending. This was a lovely opportunity for staff, parents and families to spend time with their children on what is normally such a busy time of day. Thank you to all that attended.

We have also been asking some of the older children each day if they would like to go upstairs for an hour or so each day to ‘help’ with the babies. This is a great learning experience for all children involved so look out for this in the coming weeks!

In February we will welcome some new children, with Leo, Sophia and Matilda all joining our Hedgehog room.

Activities

The children on the ground floor have been very excited learning about foods, Scotland and of course Haggis! We will continue this for a few more weeks before we move on to the next topic.

The younger children have been really enjoying our new kitchen apparatus and playing with the new foods. They have also shown a great interest in the messy play that is always available. The messy play room is such a hit and we are really enjoying seeing what the staff come up with each week!

Staffing

We would like to welcome Claire Kennedy. Claire has over 10 years childcare experience and is settling into her role as preschool leader very well. A very big welcome to Claire!