What’s been happening at Kingswood this November?

Bonfire Night

To start the month off we explored lots of different colours in all the rooms, and talked about bonfire night and firework displays. The children all enjoyed painting their own displays.

 

Remembrance Day

Here the children explored different textures and paints to interpret their own poppies.

Children in Need

We had such huge support this year from the local community to help organise a raffle with some fantastic prizes.

We managed to raise nearly £400 for Children in Need, and we also all got to come to nursery in our pyjama for a whole week!

Here are some of the prizes we had on offer, and also some of the activities we did to help support such a fantastic charity.

Winter weather

To get us ready for the run up to December and Christmas, we even experienced a nice frosting of snow. The children loved to explore and make different marks in the snow. It was great to then come inside and make our own ice and snowflakes too.

June here at Kingswood!

Summer time fun!

We kicked off June here at Kingswood with our summer themed Toddler Room parent workshop! We were over the moon with the turnout of all those who attended the event that we held outdoors in the garden. During the workshop, Toddlers enjoyed taking part in lots of arts and crafts activities, such as painting pictures and getting messy! They also enjoyed some cutting and sticking with lots of different texture materials – how exciting!

Father’s Day at Kingswood…

June also consisted of lots of lovely Father’s Day celebrations. We carried out many Father’s Day themed activities, including making personalised cardboard plates!

Healthy eating at it’s finest!

Our Pre-Schoolers took control of Healthy Eating Week, holding their very own ‘Kingswood Council Meeting’ where they talked about what changes they could make to have a healthier diet! Some of the alterations they cleverly came up with included changing their lunch to a healthy stir fry – which went down a tasty treat! They also decided to add fruit to their water – we think this might have been their favourite invention of all, as they then discussed if this was something they’d like to do all the time! Toddlers also tried lots of new and exciting tropical fruits during snack time. To finish off Healthy Eating Week, Pre-School created their own pizzas, using their new wealth of knowledge to add plenty of healthy toppings!

 

Kingswood’s efforts to be more sustainable…

During June, we introduced new recycling bins outside, in an effort to be more sustainable and make a difference to the environment! We talked about why it is important to recycle, and how it can help our planet before our Toddlers helped pick up cardboard and other recyclable materials, and then carefully put them into to correct bins!

To finish off June…

We ended June by celebrating the second and final Eid of this year! We had a super fun day learning all about the festive celebration, as well of doing lots of different Eid related activities, such as dressing up in traditional clothing and designing our own henna tattoos!

January at Kingswood 2023!

Happy New Year!

Here are a few things that we have been getting up to at Kingswood this month…

In the run up to the New Year, the children took part in an inspiring firework tuff tray activity. They talked a lot about the New Year and how people may celebrate.

Here are a couple of the children playing in the tuff tray.

People who help us!

Pre-School have had some visitors in this month! Thanks to some wonderful parents that willingly gave up their time to answer our call for their assistance, the children were able to learn about what they do for a living and how they help within their role. Among others we were lucky enough to hear from a barrister and a doctor. The children got to try on different items relevant to the jobs and gain knowledge about the roles.

This then inspired great conversations around what they want to be when they grow up, and fabulous role play!

Chinese New Year!

Here we celebrated by having all the children try some delicious Chinese food! We had vegetable spring rolls, prawn crackers and Quorn and vegetable chow mein noodles. The children used their skills to make lanterns, we spoke about it being the Year of the Rabbit, and what everyone else’s birth years were.

Big Garden Bird Watch and Squirrel Appreciation Day!

As part of the Big Garden Bird Watch, and Squirrel Appreciation Day,  the children went on a walk around the wooded area across from the setting. We also took a trip to the local park. The children all wanted to see what birds they could find and see if they could spot any squirrels. They looked into where the animals natural habitats were, and came back to make their own animals, and houses for them to live in.  

National Storytelling Week!

As part of National Storytelling Week, the Pre-Schoolers took a trip to one of the local libraries. They enjoyed listening to stories and looking at the books while they were there.

Staff have been reminding parents about our own Lending Library, and many children have taken advantage by borrowing a book to take home and enjoy with their parents.

Reading stories at nursery with all the children is very important; afterwards, as a result, they engage in role play, tuff tray activities, and many more, relating to the books that we read. It also contributes greatly to their language development & increasing their vocabulary.

We are now looking forward to World Book Day in March!

Arrrr-gust at Kingswood!!

This month at Kingswood, we have all really enjoyed incorporating pirate month into our activities. The children have dressed up, read books and learnt all about everything pirate! They have been making pirate ships, having treasure hunts, making treasure maps, hats and eye patches.

Here you can see them using the tea bags to make the paper look ‘old’

Commonwealth Games

The end of July and the beginning of August saw the excitement of the Commonwealth Games, held in Birmingham. We here, in our Pre-School room particularly, decided to hold our own Commonwealth Games activities. This really helped support the children’s physical development, as well as understanding the fun and importance of taking part in the different activities that we did. These included beanbag tossing, jumping and measuring how high, skipping, and hopping races, to name a few!

Yorkshire Day

To support Yorkshire Day the children engaged in a number of different activities. We had teabags in our sensory, we printed and used gluing and sticking to make our own roses, and also moulded the playdough into the shapes of roses. A highlight had to be enjoying our vegetable stew with Yorkshire puddings for lunch!

International Owl Awareness Day

This day also incorporated other nocturnal animals, including bats, and sparked plenty of interest and discussion about what animals are nocturnal, and why they are. It then extended into chat about day time and night time, light and dark, animal sounds, things you can hear and much more! Another extension was making masks of the different animals and role playing their own interpretation of the animals – highly entertaining!

Final Goodbyes 🙁

Finally, this was the month that we wished farewell to our last lot of school leavers heading off to ‘big school’. It has been so lovely to watch and see them progress throughout the years that they have been with us and we wish them all the best in the future.

Kingswood In March!!

We have been getting very busy this month here at Kingswood. Starting with Pancake Day and Ash Wednesday where the children got to experience yummy pancakes for snack and a vegetarian corn beef hash for lunch. We incorporated this into our healthy eating by adding fruit and talking about how the fruit and vegetables keep us healthy.

HEY AWARD – Here at Kingswood we have been working towards our Healthy Early Years Award, between the Deputy Manager Chloe (who is currently on maternity leave) and the Acting Deputy Amy, they have provided staff with the HEY Toolkit, making them more aware of the correct portion sizes, exercise goals, bottle feeding best practice, safe sleep best practice and many more that is included. The beginning of March saw us have our HEY inspection and we are now awaiting our result.

World Book Day came next. The staff and the children enjoyed dressing up as their favourite characters and raising money for the Crackerjacks Children’s Trust. We managed to raise a grand total of £120 – huge thanks to all of those who contributed. The children engaged in story making activities, read their favourite stories and set up book-themed tuff trays. We also promoted our lending library for children to take them home.

Science week stemmed some great exploration, the staff helped the children explored in many different experiments. From bubble wrap painting to volcano eruptions. We continued this on water day talking about the water cycle and conducting an experiment to help explain this cycle.

Comic relief saw the children come dressed in red! We talked to the older children about what comic relief represented and asked questions about how they think people could help. We focused some of our activities around the theme incorporating it into the children’s interests.

We have generally had lots of fun outside, especially the week running up to mothers day where the sun started coming out for Spring.

Mother’s Day the the children did some planting, we talked a lot about what plants need, the beginning of Spring and the cycle of plants. I hope all had a lovely Mother’s Day and we will see you next time our blog comes along.

October’s Activities at Kingswood

October has been a busy month for us here at Kingswood Day Nursery and Pre-School. We would like to share all of our fun, exciting, engaging and thought provoking activities with you.

First of all, please join us in sending massive congratulations to Laura Standering and her husband Mark on the birth of their baby boy! Rowan Christopher Daniel Standering was born on Sunday 21st October 2018 at 1.25am, weighing 7lb 13oz. We all wish them all well and can’t wait to meet baby Rowan!

Baby Room have been exploring different textures during our sensory play sessions, they particularly enjoyed the cooked spaghetti and custard!

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The Pre-School children have had lots of fun outside exploring the tyres, making obstacle courses, balancing and concentrating on stepping from tyre to tyre. They also worked well as a team and showed fantastic imagination by creating our train and deciding that they were off to the seaside!

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The Toddlers have spent lots of time and effort growing their own tomatoes. They have taken good care of the plants by making sure that they provided them with plenty of water to help them to grow. They looked after them so well that the tomatoes grew well and turned a lovely ripe red. The group were so pleased when they could actually taste the tomatoes that they had worked so hard to grow together.

Knife control chopping activity.Image may contain: 1 person, food

 

Wear It Pink was a fun-filled day with lots of activities. Favourites were definitely the baking and the painting. The Pre-School children did a great job of weighing out all the ingredients using the scales and getting the measurements just right for some tasty buns. The staff helped the children to develop their technology skills and take some risks by using the electric whisk to mix all the ingredients together. The children were all very proud of their achievements. The Babies really enjoyed the painting; exploring the texture of the cold paint on their hands. Thank you to all the children, staff and parents for baking and bringing there produce to our bake sale. Thanks to everyone’s hard work and contributions on the day, I am pleased to inform you that we raised a brilliant £60.00 – well done everyone!  If you missed our fundraiser you can still donate by going to the Wear It Pink website.

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Pre-school children baking for charity eventBabies being creative with painting activity.

Halloween at Kingswood was a hocus pocus time! We had some super spooky activities throughout the week which included making potions, baking monster buns, creepy crawly play dough, pumpkin exploration, wriggling rice pictures and loads more.  Here are a few photographs of our Halloween themed week. I think the children enjoyed the Halloween party and the dressing up the most!

Halloween potion making

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The Babies had an exploratory afternoon over on the local field to discover different Autumn materials. We found some lovely conkers, leaves and twigs which we are going to be using for our Autumn Day Workshop.  The children especially enjoyed the crinkle and rustling of the leaves.

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Autumn days leaf picking activity.

Finally for this month, we wanted to share our Babies’ incredible artwork. They are getting prepared for bonfire night by creating this master piece together as a group. The babies loved the bright colours and showed particular interest in the patterns that their cardboard fireworks made on the black paper. I am sure they will enjoy watching the real fireworks on Monday 5th November.

Printing activity Fireworks painting activities

 

’17-’18 End of year review

However unlikely it may seem to be, we’re suddenly in August drawing the year to a close! Although I usually leave the blogging to others, I’ve decided to proffer this in addition.

Firstly, I’d like to start by congratulating our four fantastic settings and their Managers on what has been an amazing first year to our new and improved Company. We’ve seen an abundance of visitors into nursery, trips out for the children, workshops which lots of our current families will have participated in and enriching extra-curricular events such as Zoolab, Mini Movez and pottery painting. We’ve introduced our Facebook pages which have had a brilliant reception across the board, particularly in terms of keeping parents informed of upcoming occasions and being able to see photos in a timelier fashion. We’ve also, obviously, released our new website with this blog feature!

A year ago, the owner made the decision to employ me as an Area Manager – I am the person who monitors progress in all our branches and provides support to the Managers in all areas of administration, staffing and the general running of the settings. Together, we then decided to employ an overarching Special Educational Needs Coordinator to support the many children we cater for with additional needs – we found Clare Hough who slotted in so perfectly and is now considered invaluable. Next on the agenda in our bid to boost our quality was to find a Quality Practice Manager to spend time in each of the branches evaluating the environments we have on offer and the practice of our staff – Anna Cam came onboard and superseded our hopes and expectations. She does all of what we wanted as well as supporting staff with feedback, targets and tailored training, making her priceless.

We’ve presented a multitude of enriching aspects to how we run our settings over the year – the majority of parents now take advantage of being able to pay their monthly fees by BACS transfer; a termly newsletter is now sent out keeping the information streamlined, more relevant and up to date; ‘Fresh Fruit Friday’ is on offer in each branch on the last Friday of each month providing a tasty, free snack and a great opportunity to model healthy eating choices; a lending library is in operation in each of our settings encouraging children and parents to share literary opportunities together at home; the nursery menus had a huge overhaul which gave the children the chance to experiment with lots of new and exciting dishes that all take into account the recommended nutritional values and portion sizes; we’ve extended our opening hours to 7am-7pm Mon-Fri assisting greatly with many of our working families’ needs; last but by no means least, we’ve undertaken an enormous amount of maintenance and improvements across all four of our branches to ensure the environment is kept to a high standard for each and every one of the children we care for.

There’s been a definite move towards striving for quality and, in that vein, we’ve been making conscious efforts to let our staff know just how valued they are. We’ve introduced Room Coordinators to enable people who’d like to progress in their career with us; several staff incentives to boost morale and keep motivation high have been introduced; and an amazing Christmas celebration which ended 2017 beautifully. Perhaps best of all, July saw the EYCE staff team embark on a ‘seaside jolly’ to Scarborough for the day! The trip was a treat from the owner to thank us all for an extremely successful year and to celebrate a year of the newly branded Company. It was a really lovely day with gorgeous sunshine, beautiful scenery and a relaxing boat trip, all perfectly topped off with an amazing fish and chip lunch!

As I look forward to the new academic year, and more success for Early Years Care and Education Ltd, I’d like to say a huge thank you to all our wonderful employees and to all our existing families for their continued support.

Lisa Mapley – Area Manager

June adventures at Kingswood

Well to start with this month we are delighted to have welcomed back to the team some long standing staff members ……Emma Wilks has returned from her maternity leave, she will be back at nursery Tuesday’s – Fridays’s and will return to her post as Deputy Manager. We would like to thank Laura Standering for doing a great job in her role as Acting Deputy Manager. Leanne Cully has returned to Kingswood after her third child and a small break in childcare, we are really happy that they are both back on board!

The Pre-School children have embarked on our yearly train, tram and bus trip this month, this linked in brilliantly with both topics we have been following – transport and child safety week. The Pre-School children had an excellent and educational journey from nursery to Sheffield city centre and back again. The children went in small groups and travelled on a bus to Dore train station, then they caught the train into Sheffield, jumped on a tram from the station to a nearby bus stop and then caught a bus back to Kingswood. The children had a great time paying the transport drivers, collecting their tickets and learning about the different ways vehicles move across the city.

        

Pre-School has also held a workshop to celebrate Father’s Day. The children really engaged well and embraced the activities which were kebab making, vehicle junk modelling and den building. All feedback received was really positive and some lovely comments were made about our dedicated team and all the effort they went to in order to encourage parental involvement  in their children’s nursery day.

            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Baby Room really enjoyed promoting healthy eating week by tasting lots of different fruits – watermelon, raspberries, strawberries, mango and many more. The Toddlers really got involved with healthy eating week too by growing, picking, chopping and eating their own radishes! They were very proud of their achievement, as you can see from the pictures.

 

  

The toddlers have recently had 3 new members join their group; we would like to introduce Guppy, Steve and Pedro, our goldfish. The toddlers are finding the experience of looking after them both rewarding and exciting. We gave the children the opportunity to ‘have their say’ when it came to naming the 3 newcomers . We displayed a ballot box outside toddler room and the children put their suggestions in, we then picked 3 names at random to confirm their new identities.

Parent’s Evening and School leavers Transition Evening were both a great success. They provided a lovely opportunity for all our parents to talk in a little more detail to the staff about their child’s development and next steps. We had a great turn out as usual and all our parents were happy with their child’s progress.

All in all, June has been an exciting, fun-filled month with plenty of learning, laughter and life experiences. We look forward to updating you next term with many more fun and educational adventure!

February at Kingswood

Dress up days, police, hard hats,fun, experiementingexcellent costume, cat, dress up day, charity event

Throughout February Kingswood Day Nursery have been up to lots of fun and exciting activities. Utilising our loose-themed topic of ‘People Who Help Us’ we have invited visitors to the nursery and have been on an exciting trip out to the Old Police and Fire Museum. The children loved the coach journey to the museum and they particularly enjoyed exploring the inside of the ambulances and fire engines.  Our visitors have been DR Vicky Fletcher a local GP who brought all of her equipment for the children to explore and experiment with. They had great fun finding each other’s heartbeats and checking that their friends and carers didn’t have temperatures by using the thermometers!  We also had a visit from local PCSO’s – Adrian Thomson and Samantha Pacey. The Pre-School children particularly enjoyed dressing up in the police uniforms and trying out the hard hats! The PCSO’s shared lots of useful information about what to do if we need help and reminded us of the all important number to call – ‘999’.

We also hosted a charity event at Kingswood last month. ‘Crackerjacks’ is a local children’s charity who we have continually supported throughout the years. This year we raised money by inviting the children of Kingswood to dress up and have a fun princesses and hero’s day! All the children had an amazing day and dressed up as their favourite characters. The toddlers had a great time making masks by gluing and sticking, glittering and being very creative! As you can see from the pictures they did a great job and wore them with pride.

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At our setting we like to promote diversity and culture and, with this in mind, the toddlers have really embraced learning about Chinese New Year.  The children all made their own lanterns which they decorated and took home, as well as all contributing to a group creative activity of making an enormous Chinese Dragon.

We have recently introduced our lending library where we are further promoting literacy. Children and parents/carers can select and borrow books from the nursery library to share together at home. There is opportunity for even more parental involvement as we always welcome additions to the lending library from books that are no longer favourites in your household. This lending library links in beautifully with the promotion of ‘World Book Day’ and we have been able to provide all parents with a token which entitles them to receive a discount on many books from lots of high street shops.

Our upcoming events in the near future will include a ‘Mother’s Day Workshop’ for our Pre-School children, it’s a great opportunity for parental involvement. We have invited mothers, grandmothers and aunties along with any other influential female role models to attend our workshop on Tuesday 6th March 2018, where we will be baking tiffin, threading love heart cards, making flowers, making and moulding salt dough models and much, much more.

We will all be celebrating and supporting ‘Sport’s Relief’ by taking part in running races and other physical games. The babies will be toddling around our soft surfaced play area, throwing, catching and rolling balls to each other. Whilst our toddlers and pre-school children will be taking part in running races, obstacle courses and trying out their throwing skills with target practice games.

We are expecting a visit from Zoolab on 19th April  with their exotic animals.  The children will have the opportunity to look at & hold snakes, spiders & lots of other creepy crawlies! The expected learning outcomes are that children will discover, explore, investigate and ask questions about the different characteristics of the mini beasts and other animals from all around the world.

We look forward to another exciting term of events and will be back to update you further with other exciting activities!

dress up day, princess, charity eventPretty girl, princess dress, dress up day, charity event