Manager’s Corner

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 5

D A T E S F O R

D I A R Y !

Monday 2nd March — St David’s Day —Children will spend the day learning all about Wales, involving lots of craft and baking activities! Any family with Welsh connections are more than welcome to share ideas for how we can celebrate and even be involved on the day—please get in touch with your child’s Group Leader if you think you can help out!

Thursday 5th March — World Book Day —We absolutely love books and stories in our nursery and think this is a wonderful day to celebrate! All children and staff will come into nursery dressed as their favourite story book character You are invited to bring your story in to share with your friends at circle time too—but the important thing to re-member is that it is a celebration of wonder-ful books—so please try to choose a story character rather than a TV or film charac-ter! We will have lots of story themed activities over the day and can’t wait to see how amazing you will all look! We would really love for our parents to get involved with this—so if you would like to come in to nursery to read a story to your child’s group please let a Group Leader or member of the Management Team know so that we can organise it—it really would be lovely!

Wednesday 11th March — Miss Roberts’ Class Trip to the Aquarium —All the chil-dren will be off on an exciting trip to see all of the sea life at the Blue Planet Aquarium. Please check your letter for further details and payment information. If you have lost your letter please ask Miss Roberts or Miss Caswell for another copy.

Friday 13th March — Comic Relief —The theme this year is to make your face funny for money! Staff will be making their faces funny for money, we will also have a ’Wear your Pyjamas' to nursery day for a charita-ble donation. The children will also be able to have their faces painted for an additional £1 cost—the payment of £1 also confirms to us permission for your child’s face to be paint-ed. Only children who have paid their addi-tional £1 will have faces painted. We hope to raise as much as we can for this excellent cause and hope that you will support us generously!

Monday 16th March— Mother’s Day Celebration—To celebrate this lovely day where we get to show our wonderful Mum-mies how much we love them we will be having a Stay & Play afternoon where all Mummies, Grandmas, Aunts and Sisters are welcome to join us for some crafty fun and afternoon tea. Please confirm with your child’s Group Leader if you are planning to attend so we can cater accordingly!

Tuesday 17th March—St Patrick’s Day—Today the children will have lots of fun learning all about Ireland from the national flag to Irish music! Any family with Irish connections are more than welcome to share ideas for how we can celebrate and even be involved on the day—please get in touch with your child’s Group Leader if you think you can help out!

Friday 20th March—March Equinox—Children will celebrate the start of Spring with lots of lovely themed activities involving plenty of planting to get our gardens grow-ing! Any donation of flowers, bulbs or vegetables for the garden would be greatly appreciated!

Thursday 2nd April — Easter Party—We will be celebrating this festive period with an Easter Party on Thursday afternoon. There will be lots of dancing, themed activi-ties and yummy food. Donations of food are welcome but must be in original wrappers/packaging so that we can monitor food allergies. There will also be a competition for the children to join in where we are asking children to bring in their best festive decorated egg! This could be a real painted hard boiled egg, a decorated polystyrene egg or even a mega cardboard cut out decorat-ed—the more creative and crafty the bet-ter! We look forward to seeing what you can make at home!

Younger Squirrels

Newsletter

Welcome to 2015 everyone, we are very much looking forward to an exciting year ahead at Monton Village, we know the year will be full of lots of exciting activities and learning! We have had such a busy half term all ready and we want to say thank you for all your support as always. The Chatterbox Challenge was a real success and all of the children did so well! We all came together in the hall for a giant sing along and it was lots of fun. Thanks to all of the children who raised money; and a huge thanks to those parents who really went above and beyond, raising huge sums for such a worthy charity! Well done! There are lots of exciting things to look forward to over the coming half term; all of Miss Roberts’ class are super excited for their upcoming trip to the Aquarium and we know they will have lots of fun looking at all the differ-ent sea life and learning all about under the sea...maybe they will even find Nemo! We will also be celebrating lots of different events over the coming half term so please keep those important dates for diaries to hand so as not to miss out! Our Facebook page has been a huge success so far and there have been lots of lovely photos shared on the site as well as reminders for upcoming events. There is also a function for you to be able to get in touch with us if you should need to for any last minute questions/information. It’s never too late to get involved; if you would like to see photos of your child ’s day at nursery then ask a member of staff for a permissions slip and give us a like on Facebook. We are very excited to see the evenings growing longer and signs of finer weather creeping in. However, the weather can still be very wet and cold and our children just love learning outdoors and accessing the fresh air; it would be hugely appreciated by all staff if you could provide suitable clothing for the weather and a pair of named wellies to keep your child’s toes warm and dry! The outdoor provision is a fundamental part of early years provision and is the richest learning ground for your children; it is where they adventure, imagine, explore and have real experiences better than any other place. All of our children adore the outdoors and really don’t mind if the sun is shining or the rain is falling—it is all one big adventure! Please help us to give them the very best start by ensuring they have the correct clothing for the day. Thank you in anticipation of your support. We would also like to congratulate Miss Darvill on her move to join the Man-agement Team—we are all very pleased with this and are sure that Miss Dar-vill will be a wonderful addition to our Management!

Miss Bagnall

This half term we have had lots of fun exploring with paint. We have been making lots of interesting marks using a range of differ-ent tools such as the rollers, paint brushes, stamps and even our feet! We have had lots of fun creating lots of different sensory bottles to explore and play with. We have used lots of different materials, such as sequins, pasta, shells and pom poms! We have enjoyed celebrating lots of different themed days of this half term. We really enjoyed Australia Day where we painted out very own surf boards and collaged cute and cuddly koala bears! We liked celebrating Burns Night and decorated our own Loch Ness monsters! We particularly enjoyed tasting the tatties and neeps for lunch! We really enjoyed Pancake Day where we tasted lots of different toppings on our pancakes and Chinese New Year was love-ly trying all the different and new flavours! We have also been busy exploring our ICT toys over the last half term, working out how to make them flash and make noises for us to boogie to! We love these toys and are learning all about cause and effect. We have continued to develop our physical development with a fo-cus being our health and self care. We are all getting so grown up now and have started feeding ourselves by holding the spoons at meal times. We are getting very good at guiding the food to our mouths and are so proud of ourselves when we are successful! We will continue to work on this over the next half term and we will be getting outside lots to really work on our gross motor movements!

Our staff have been busy attending lots of useful training courses! Well done to

everyone listed below!

Miss Roberts & Miss Darvill— Mark Mak-ing Across the Early Years

Miss Roberts & Miss Darvill—Participation through Play

Morgan—What’s Not Written

Rachelle, Pagan, Amanda, Miss Roberts, Miss Darvill, Jen & Sarah —Paediatric

First Aid

Sarah — A big congratulations to Sarah for achieving her Level 3 Childcare Quali-

fication!

Staff Development &

Training

Firstly let me welcome all our wonder-ful children and parents into Older Squirrels, they have begun to settle in really well into their new group and are beginning to make lots of friends as you will be able to see through our exciting new Facebook page and re-ports sent home! They have been hav-ing an amazing time doing lots of baking activities to share with their parents, whomever is lucky enough to collect that night! They have all been learning and listening to the song ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and learning all about the colours black and white and how they make such amazing patterns when used in different ways. It was through all the fun experimenting with this that we chose our next exciting topic which

is ‘Patterns’! We will be starting off looking at spots and stripes using our 3 primary colours. It is a well-timed topic with Easter on the way and all the fun we can have designing our own funky, patterned Easter eggs! We have also begun a colour themed week to help children recognise and learn these 3 colours before they move up into The Village. Our lovely activities have been based around these colours for the last 2 weeks and it is proving to be a real hit with the children in the class. We look forward to continue developing our understanding of this over the coming half term as we prepare for Easter!

Older Squirrels

We have all had a very busy half term and all of our new friends have settled in remarkably well. The chil-dren have developed new friendship groups already and seem to be grasp-ing the everyday rules and routines well. All the staff are very proud of their progress! The children have enjoyed learning all about ‘the weather’ and ‘the sea-sons of the year’. They have made lots of exciting things including weather pictures using water-colour paints, a rainbow hand print, and ‘The Little Raindrop’ puppets on a lollipop stick. We have focused mainly on the story of ‘The Little Raindrop’, and talked about the water cycle. We have participated in lots of ex-citing themed days over the last term which we have really enjoyed.

The chil-dren have taken part in support-

ing The British Heart Founda-tion, a Valen-tine’s themed party day, Pan-cake Day, and Chinese New Year this half term. Our blos-som paintings for Chinese New Year were par-ticularly suc-cessful as we are sure you will agree! Next term our topic will be Transport, and we will be learning all about the different ways of moving around and getting to plac-es. We will also be looking for-ward to our trip to the Blue Plan-et Aquarium, we are sure that it will be a brilliant day!

Miss Roberts’

This half term we have been helping our new ‘Villagers’ settle in to their new class, and encouraging every-one to share our resources nicely. This half term we have looked at the country of Italy, where we practised balancing on one leg to copy the leaning tower of Pisa! We also had lots of fun trying lots of differ-ent Italian foods such as sausage and ham pasta parcels, mascar-pone sauce, garlic bread and pizza! We also enjoyed playing in cooked spaghetti pasta, prac-tising twirling pasta on to a fork. We have been very busy creat-ing lovely Valentine’s cards for our special somebody...mostly our Mummies and Daddies! We also had lots of fun making our own jam heart shaped sandwich-es. Our favourite part was spreading the jam over a slice of bread—it was very sticky! Next half term we are going to be looking at Spring. We will be dis-

cussing all of the different animals that we see during Spring and what their babies are called! We will also be talking about the different flow-ers that we see. We are going to try and grow our very own beautiful daffodils too! Alongside this we

will con-tinue to work on sharing with our friends and be-ing nice to each other.

The Village

We have had lots of fun this half term and have wel-comed all of our new friends up from The Village. Our new chil-dren have

settled in very well and have been having lots of fun with their new friends! We have started to work on our sharing skills in nursery and will contin-ue to work on these. We have enjoyed learning about dif-ferent types of transport and we made our own traffic light pictures and learnt about what the colours meant. These looked brilliant and we had so much fun getting messy in the process! We have also enjoyed lots of new mark making activities and have thoroughly enjoyed taking part in these and being creative. We really enjoyed the 3D mark making were we decorated and wrote all over boxes wrapped in paper. Another big hit was the crayons on the back of cars; we zoomed the cards around the table and were amazed by the wonderful patterns they left behind!

We have enjoyed all of the differ-ent themed days over the last half term and our favourite one was where we experimented with food from around the world. Our group chose Mexico; we learnt some facts about this country and even did some food tasting! We are beginning to have a ‘Story of the Month’ and the story will be chosen by the children. We will then be doing activities based on the story to extend and enrich our story understanding. Our topic next half term will be ‘Animals’ as our chil-dren have taken a keen interest in getting the animals out and pre-tending to be them. We will learn about the patterns on animals and about their habitats as well as lots of other things about them too!

Miss Darvill’s