Playgroup is now closed for the October break. We will re-open in our newly redecorated playroom on Monday October 22nd.
As we are well into the autumn season and, with the weather getting colder and wetter, we would be very grateful if parents can remember to send waterproofs and wellies with their children 🍁🍂🍂🌧🌬.
Our woodland play sessions will continue after the October break. Our next session will be on Thursday Oct 25th.
We are always pleased to welcome Lisa from Child Smile to playgroup. Today she brought our friend Ollie along and talked to the children about how to brush their teeth. The children are always interested in her talks and love to brush Ollie’s teeth!
Huge thank you to the volunteers who came along to help clear out our room today. We cant wait to see how our room looks after it has been redecorated!
We have been interested in fungi in the woods and this week we started to grow our own fungi in the playroom. We have been amazed at how quickly our fungi have grown. These fungi are ordinary mushrooms and it has been gratifying to hear the children remember the instructions they heard in the woods so clearly – always wash your hands if you touch fungi in the woods.
After picking some of our mushrooms we used knives to cut them up and to see the gills underneath the cap. The stalks just snapped off, we didn’t need to use the knife at all.
We have also been interested in pizza in the playroom and in finding where the Gruffalo lives in the woods. We combined all of our interest today and made a Gruffalo and mushroom shaped pizza. We suggested putting some (real) mushrooms on our mushroom shaped pizzas but that didnt go down too well!
This article has a strong US focus but contains many thinking points for me. It echoes again how much children’s lives have changed in recent years and how much more adults directed they become. Well meaning adults work as hard as they can (in more ways than one) to do the very best for their children but, by inflicting adult determined rules and goals on children, instead can limit children’s opportunities to learn and develop.
As with most things I think there is a balance to be had. The discipline, teamwork and sportsmanship that comes with organised sports is significant though I’d agree with the article that these are not skills particularly suited to very young children who are still developing emotional, communication and movement skills.
https://www.self-directed.org/tp/organized-sports-not-play/
We have been very interested in finding out more about where animals live and were looking for foxes’ dens, squirrels’ dreys and badgers’ setts when we were in the woods this week. We noticed some bird boxes that people had put on trees and decided that we would try making one that we could take to the woods and see if a bird would like to live in it. We made a prototype box and painted it a lovely shade of purple – what bird would not want to live in such a beautiful home?? We are going to make a real bird box in our workshop this week.
We had a fantastic session in the woods today. Our children are growing in confidence in the woodland environment.
We were interested to see if there were any changes to the woods after Storm Ali visited last week. We did see several trees that had fallen over and lots and lots of leaves and sticks on the ground. We remembered that the rain had turned the path into a river and we saw how the water had washed away some of the stones and mud and made the path all bumpy.
We were visited by several dogs during our session today and it was lovely to see how our children are learning to respect animals and beginning to understand that they should stand still and wait until the dogs have gone past. We were unlucky however that one passing dog took a fancy to one of our children’s mitts and ran off with it! If anyone finds a (lovely) mutt with a mitt in the neighbourhood please let us know!
We tried out a new activity today and put up a hammock. The children rapidly became experts at getting on to and out of the hammock. They thoroughly enjoyed the gentle swaying motion of swinging in the hammock and gazing at the trees and sky.
We were excited by the number of different mushrooms and toadstool we’ve been finding and also are becoming experts at spotting them in lots of different places. Some grow high up on trees, some in the grass and some in hollows beside the tree roots. There are so many shapes and colours. We have been learning that some mushrooms and toadstools can make us feel very sick so that we never try to eat them and that its best not to touch them. Sometimes we might touch one accidentally though and that’s ok, we just need to remember to wash our hands.
We’ve also been thinking about where the birds and animals in the woods live. We spotted some nest boxes on our walk to the woods today and we think it would be good to make a bird box and put it up in the woods for the birds to make a nest in. We found a den that looked just like the Gruffalo’s den so we decided to see if we could find where Fox, Owl, Snake and Mouse live too!
All in all, a huge amount of fun and just as much learning packed into 3 hours this morning 👍🏻
We were very pleased to host our very first Soup Share at Playgroup today. We made breadsticks, butter and some delicious carrot soup using the carrots we picked from our garden yesterday. We invited our friends from Cambusbarron Nursery to join us since they helped us sow the seeds in our garden in the spring time and we wanted to share our harvest with them. It was a fantastic happy occasion which we hope we will be able to repeat (not sure we will have enough carrots for more soup though!) #bigsoupshare2018
Today we made scones and took them to the Needle and Natter McMillan Coffee Morning. We also donated our snack money. We enjoyed helping our friends at the Needle and Natter and appreciate being part of such a great community.
Tomorrow is our first Soup Share lunch. We picked carrots from our garden – we were amazed at the colours and shapes of the carrots. We will make carrot soup and share it with our friends in the community tomorrow.
Flu is very infectious and can be serious. Flu can lead to complications that may result in hospitalisation or even death.
Even healthy children can become seriously ill from flu and can spread it to family, friends and others. Every year in Scotland, children are hospitalised for the treatment of flu or its complications.
All children aged 2–5 years as of 1 September 2018 and not yet in school will be offered the nasal vaccine between October and December.
You’ll be sent a letter about contacting your GP practice to arrange an appointment for your child.
For more information please visit
https://www.nhsinform.scot/healthy-living/immunisation/vaccines/child-flu-vaccine#overview
Cambusbarron Village Nursery 