Cambusbarron Playgroup is in phase 2 of Stirling Council’s roll out of the Early Years Expansion. We are collecting views on how we should deliver the increased entitlement. Please give us your opinions at https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/V3HRM89

Our children have been enjoying making pizza out of all sorts of things this week so we decided to end the week with the real thing. The children decided that pizza needed to have tomatoes and cheese (although there was a debate on whether it should be orange or white cheese) and some of the children were adamant that pepperoni was a must.

They enjoyed kneading and rolling the dough then spreading it with tomatoes. We grated the orange (cheddar) cheese and sliced the white (mozzarella) cheese and added to the pizza before sprinkling a little pepperoni – to taste – on the top.

We were very impressed with the results – “it tastes amazing” so we will need to make pizza again, perhaps trying some different toppings next time.

The new sand area in our garden gets a big thumbs up from the children. They love digging, building and moving it around. There have been some very messy children leaving playgroup this week.

Today we were very pleased to host our 2nd Soup Share event. This time we invited the ladies from the Needle & Natter group as a thank you for all the work they have put in to making clothes for our dolls. Since Halloween is coming up we decided to make pumpkin soup. We had 3 pumpkins at playgroup, a small one, a middle sized one and a big one. We used the big one and chopped it up to put in our soup. Jane had already cooked some pumpkin in the over and we were interested to see how it had gone all soft and soggy and not like the fresh pumpkin at all. The seeds inside the pumpkin were super slimey and we did not like touching them at all! We were interested to see that the seeds are all white whereas the seeds we can eat are green. We’re not sure why that is and we want to find out! We tried cutting the seeds open and banging them with a hammer but that didnt help us work out why the seeds we can eat are green.

After we’d made our soup we made pumpkin seed rolls. We rolled out some dough and put it into baking trays and then brushed it over with some oil to make it shiny. Once they were shiny we poured green pumpkin seeds all over them and hoped they would stick to the shiny rolls.

The last thing we made was icing to go on Angus’ pumpkin muffins. We really liked the icing! It was very tempting to spill it just a little and then scoop it up with our fingers and have a little taste.

We were so pleased that lots of Needle & Natter ladies came to share our soup. They said it was very tasty and that made us feel very proud. We wore our stickers saying Soup Chef to show that we had helped cook the lunch.