Holy Corner Community Playgroup

Another fantastic year

The children have just said goodbye to each other for the summer break, and had one last play on the climbing frame - a favourite place to eat lunch and continue the play after our morning play sessions have finished. There will no doubt be many play dates over the holidays, and i'm sure the next few weeks will fly by, but for now, everyone is looking forward to a break and a time to spend time with family and friends.

Thank you to everyone who has made our community playgroup such a fantastic and thriving place for children. We are so proud of the children and wish those moving up to P1 and other pre-school settings many wonderful adventures and every happiness.

And we cannot wait to see our returning families back in August and welcome our new families! August always brings great excitement, and we are very much looking forward to another fantastic year of play!

Story telling in other languages 📚

We are so lucky at Holy Corner to have a wonderful variety of languages among the parents and practitioners, and even luckier that they are happy to share these with the children through stories and song. Every term the children hear familiar and new stories in unfamiliar languages, and their concentration and joy hearing these new sounds is testament to the power of language and expression. Recently, the children have heard stories in Polish, Italian, Arabic, Turkish and many many more, and we are so grateful to everyone who has shared these stories with us.

Earlier this week, one parent shared a much-loved tale, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, in Russian. She showed the children the different letters used in Russian, and gave everyone a name tag with their name written with these letters. As one child said enthusiastically "my name has different shapes" ☺ The children also looked at a book of trains, which showed the trans-Siberian express, and talked about the different animals that you could see along the way, and played with some Russian dolls.

Taking our painting outside 🌞🌿🎨🖌

Painting at our outdoor easels under the open sky of our cosy and peaceful garden is an enriching sensory experience for the children. Our easels are up all year round, but there have been a few more takers this last week with the warm weather returning at last. The dappled shade of our garden, with the backdrop of willow fencing, is the perfect space for exploring light, colour and mark making.

As one of our 3 year olds said when they were painting a big, expressive picture of green, yellow and white, pointing to different parts: 'This bit is light. And this is darker'.

Our outdoor easels are ready to use, any time, where children can act on the impulse to create and investigate, as the fleeting light and weather conditions evoke constant wonder and curiosity.

Outdoor Bookbug Magic 📚🌿🌻

We celebrated Bookbug week and Outdoor Classroom Day today by taking the Explorer bags outdoors with us into the garden, where we could enjoy this year's stories under the cloudy sky and the lights showers of rain, try out the postcards and activities with mark-making, while also enjoying a hook a duck game.

Indoors, our story corner was a fun and cosy space with puppets to bring the stories alive and open up the imagination through role play and storytelling. Children spent time looking at the Bookbug stories reflectively, as well as in a large group on our gathering rug. Together we heard the entertaining 'Runaway Cone', a counting story 'Hen in the Bed' and the richly rhyming 'Dick the Delightful Duck'.

The children were excited to receive their Bookbug Bags today - thank you to the Scottish Book Trust!