Next Thursday is World Book Day and the School Pupil Council would like to enjoy and promote reading on this day. Everyone is invited to come to school and nursery dressed as a character from a book and it would be great if each child could tell us about their character and book. We also aim to create a whole school bookworm!

In addition we shall be focussing on stories written by Julia Donaldson. Towards the end of the week we will vote for our favourite story. This is a good opportunity for parents to also focus on bedtime reading and to talk together with your child about characters and types of stories.

Happy reading!

We plan to include woodwork as one of our regular outdoor activities on offer to the children.  We have our busy bench under the shelter and a set of child-sized tools, safety goggles and gloves.  Children will only be allowed to use the woodworking tools if they are wearing the appropriate safety equipment.  Children will be involved in creating their own risk assessment of the activity (in addition to the official one!)

It would be great to have an extra pair of hands to help us support this activity.  Initially we plan to offer woodwork during our Wednesday sessions (Mondays and Thursdays are ‘Mud Days’!).  If you feel you could spare an hour or two on a regular basis this would be great.  Please speak to a member of staff and we will give you a little more information about what would be involved.  If we have lots of volunteers we could set up a rota.

We would welcome any offcuts of untreated wood, sandpaper, short nails or screws that are left over from any DIY projects.

Parents/Carers are always welcome to ‘Stay and Play’ during any session.  Please sign up on the calendar in the cloakroom.

Both bears have had a quiet week watching the kittens play.  Unfortunately the kittens were a bit scared of the bears, as the bears are so much bigger than them!

The bears are looking forward to coming back to nursery and seeing all the boys and girls from both groups again this Monday (23rd Feb).

This week the nursery children took part in the Scottish Book Awards. Throughout this term we have been reading the short listed stories, ‘Princess Penelope and the Runaway Kitten’, ‘Robot Rumpus’ and ‘Lost for Words’. After lots of reading and chatting about the stories, the children in the nursery voted for their favourite.

The winning story at Loretto nursery was….

Robot Rumpus

Well done and thank you to all the children, who all thought carefully about what book was their favourite.

We look forward to finding out the winning story after all the votes across Scotland are counted. We expect to hear the result in early March.

This morning Gillian from Zoolab came to visit the Morning Group.  She told us the story of the Zagaroo, starring Herman the hermit crab.  She brought along Gary, the Giant African Land Snail, Talulah the Tarantula and other beasts.  One of the things we learned today was that snails are born with their shells, but hermit crabs have to go and find their own one.

Gillian returned to visit the Afternoon Group with her beasts and told us the Zagaroo story.  Barry the Cockroach was even touched by Mrs Ross!  Cockroaches make a hissing sound to pretend to be a snake so bigger animals don’t eat them!  We got to touch the snake too.