We celebrated National Tree Week today by planting 5 oak saplings in Gillies Hill Community Woodland.
3 years ago our nursery children collected acorns and Amos Higgins planted them in the Walled Garden. We’ve watched them germinate and grow into baby oak trees when we’ve visited the garden. Today we were able to dig some of the saplings up and move them to a permanent home in the woodland.
Despite the frosty weather and some hefty tree roots our children worked hard to dig holes deep enough to make sure our little tree roots could spread and grow. We are grateful to Angus Elliott for helping us find the best place and for putting in stakes and tree guards to protect our baby trees from the deer and rabbits. We are looking forward to watching our trees grow! We wonder how long it will be before they are taller than we are!

Our latest newsletter is available here.

We are grateful to Willie Rennie, LibDeb MSP for North East Fife, for speaking up on CVN’s behalf at the Early Childhood Transformational Change Progamme debate last week. He, along with Roz McCall, Conservative MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Pam Duncan-Glancy Labour MSP for Glasgow, Fulton MacGregor, SNP MSP for Coatbridge and Chryston and Martin Whitfield Labour MSP for South Scotland all highlighted the financial difficulties facing services in the Private, Voluntary and Independent (PVI) sectors who, as funded providers, deliver early learning and childcare on behalf of local authorities.

PVI have long campaigned for a review of early learning and childcare funding. It was encouraging therefore to see cross party recognition that the way Scottish Government allocates funding to PVI is, according to Willie Rennie, discriminating against the sector and which has, in the words of others contributing to the debate, resulted in crisis in a sector that is “struggling” and not financially viable.

The debate concluded with Natalie Don, SNP MSP for Renfrewshire North and West and Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise, stating she “is actively engaging in, and working to support, our highly valued PVI sector” which is “fundamental both to our current offer and to our further expansion of childcare”. It is regrettable that, so far, “active engagement” has appeared to be standard replies and empty promises. There certainly has been no action.

Fortunately Ms Don acknowledged that there “is work to do”. We just hope it is not too late.

Today we had a visit from Lisa at Childsmile. She reminded our children that they should brush their teeth twice a day for 2 minutes. She brought along some of her puppets and the children took turns to practise brushing the puppets’ teeth. Lisa also brought us new toothbrushes to use when we brush our teeth in nursery.

The ladies at Rock ‘n’ Reel were looking for some Hallowe’en decorations at their class this morning and our children were very keen to help out by sharing some of ours.

We took a walk round the woods today to see Pete and Steeley at work chainsaw carving in the woods.

Our children were very interested in their chainsaws and the noise they made and were trying to guess what Pete and Steeley were making. They told us they were making a story telling chair that we would be able to use next time we are in the woods. We are looking forward to trying it out!

We had a visit from Jackie of Tapsalteerie Theatre this week. Our children were enthralled as Jackie retold one of our favourite stories, Stick Man, accompanied by a variety of songs and actions.