Blogs and News - St George's School, Edinburgh

As we are approaching the end of another busy term in preschool we wanted to share with you the highlights of our learning. At the end of February, the children came back having spent a substantial time of the year away from the nursery. Thus, when we opened our doors again we focused on supporting their transition back to nursery. The children's emotional well-being was and continues to be our main area of focus.

We based all our health and well-being activities on the story of "The Colour Monster". The story helped us understand that how we feel is a big mix of emotions which we can identify and talk about. Building our emotional vocabulary was very important! Drawings of our families helped us visualise the people who we love and will always be there for us. The children themselves started creating pictures of their homes - the homes that kept them safe and house their families. We learnt that home is not always a 'place' and as with the rest of our emotions it can be an emotion too. We feel safe in the nursery, our friends are here, and we are all a big family! This was our motto.

Along with our learning on how to express our feelings we worked through games and playful learning on number recognition, understanding quantities and comparing amounts using measurement language. Food handling played a big part in this as the girls had to follow recipes and count lemons and oranges for our messy cooking. Spontaneously all girls developed a huge interest in mark making which led to an early introduction of sounds and letters. Our self-registration was based on identifying the different letters of our names, clipboards were used everywhere, letters and cards were written to friends every day. Recipe books, rhyming stories, shop registers and many many more literacy rich experiences and mark making opportunities played their role in developing the girls' understanding of how sounds work together to create what we read and write!

The staff were involved in a course for professional development delivered by Virtual Nature School. Inspired by our learning we introduced new outdoor activities based on the possibilities of looking down, up, through and in! These experiences weaved in nicely with our photography project as all girls used the iPads to take their own photos of the things they can see up, down and through in the forest! The photography project and Virtual Nature School activities will continue throughout next term and we will finish with a photography exhibition!