Help to Redevelop the Cauldeen Nursey Garden

Pictures of our nursery garden below at its current state. At Cauldeen Primary School, the staff within the Acorn Nursery are working hard to re-develop and establish the nursery garden with a rich learning environment for active, open-ended learning, exploration, investigation and creativity. Our focus is to provide the early years children with a range of safe and open-ended learning opportunities. Through access to this, the children will:

participate in a wide range of activities that will support a healthy lifestyle,

develop the skills to access and manage risk, experience personal

achievement and build confidence, explore and make choices and develop physical skills through movement and energetic play.

Currently our garden as it stands is not looking its best. We gained extra space to extend our garden, but this was previously just an entrance, so the surface is not practical for young children. Ideally, we wish to have low maintenance, safe level and flat pavement area that will stop the build-up of surface water, preventing us from using the garden in all weathers. The grass has not grown back this year which has caused large sums of dust to fly around the garden and start collecting in clumps. Ultimatley we are aware that the garden affects the children from thriving in their own environment and we need to get the project rolling to hopefully finish this year. (Pictures of our nursery garden below)

Our funding is limited, and this would not be possible without the staff reaching out to our community for their generous support. While we have kindly received a donation of purpose-built shelters to help with the delivery of our forest school programme, allowing all children to have hands-on weekly experiences during their school day. The whole school and their families worked together to fundraise for a treehouse for the playground. But we all feel we still have a lot to accomplish to transform the early years garden as this has never undergone a redevelopment before.

With guidance and support in community grants and funding, along with the kind donations from our friends in the community this will allow us to pass the final makeover to the right level of expertise in the correct landscapers for us. We have previously spoken to landscapers who have visited and given us a dream redevelopment plan that includes levelling, creating walls and different sections/areas with slabs, artificial grass, pebbles, bark etc. To help cover and fund our vision, we are looking to get grants, donations and complete fundraising projects with the children to secure around £10,000. Our garden area is large, so this is a ballpark figure so far. Letters were given out to parents to help. We still would greatly appreciate the helping hands after the landscaping project, as we would like to create areas such as water play, construction, sand etc.

With the rapid growth in housing within our school catchment area and fact we were the first to pilot the 1140 hours, our numbers steadily increased.

Our push and investment for our nursery garden improvement will allow us to maximise full use of the garden area making sure it is adequately safe for all children to be used all year round.

As you can see from the pictures it is a massive job which we can not achieve on our own. If you would like to help and support this project in any way through donations and shares, all the staff at Cauldeen Acorn Nusery would be so greatful. We are all super excited to get this project started and have an amazing outdoor learning environment that the children can enjoy, learn and thrive in.

Thank you all! Mr McCormick, Miss Fraser, Miss Fridge, Miss Cumming, Mrs Mackay ☀️ Miss Simpson, Miss Munro, Mrs Harrold, Mrs Steel, Miss Robertson And Mrs Smith