fruit

August 2021 @ Highgate

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In July, we welcomed the Early Years Care and Education bear! Thanks to the amazing fundraising efforts across the Company for the Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity prior to the first lockdown, we were lucky enough to sponsor one of the ‘little bears’ in the Bears of Sheffield trail. The children have enjoyed finding our bear over the summer and were very proud when they received their certificates!


Toddlers have loved using their senses to explore this month! We enjoyed getting messy in our rainbow bubble foam and talked about what colours we could see! We made some great observations such as “it looks like a rainbow colour” and we decided that it felt soft! We also enjoyed smelling the lovely aroma of the foam. We were all willing to have a go and all had lots of fun exploring!



Rising 3’s had a fantastic time exploring in the woods! The children collected lots of leaves, sticks and pinecones to use in the loose parts and investigation area back at nursery. They then stopped at the park on the way back to nursery and had lots of fun on the equipment!



The children have enjoyed helping to prepare healthy snacks this month too. They used their fine motor skills to have a go at cutting their own bananas, watermelon and strawberries. We were all willing to have a go at this, trying really hard! We also made our own choices about if we would like milk or water to drink to keep us hydrated. We all tried our snack and found our fruit very yummy! Rising 3’s also had lots of fun making their own fresh bread for snack. Each child made their own pattern on the bread roll before we put them in the oven to bake. The best bit was eating them at snack time!

We’re now looking forward to starting the new academic year; we wonder what it will bring…

January at Little School House

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During January The Little School House have been up to lots of fun and exciting activities. We kick started the New Year with our loose theme topic ‘All About Me’. The Pre-School children started by talking about themselves, what they look like and how they are different from each other. They continued their learning by looking at their reflections in a mirror and drawing themselves, highlighting key features such as eye and hair colour, and then drew each other. The Baby and Toddler rooms used families as a theme and created displays of children’s family photographs, looking and talking about who the children live with and what they do as a family outside of the nursery setting. Parents enjoyed getting involved and provided us with lots of happy family memories that the children could share with each other at nursery.

Since our conception as Early Years Care and Education we have been striving to raise awareness of healthy lifestyles, diet of course being a big part of this area. As well as overhauling our menus, considering ingredients and portion sizes, we have also now introduced a new strategy – ‘Free Fruit Friday’ which runs the last Friday of each month. We are doing this as an opportunity to invite children, parents and carers to have a piece of fresh fruit on us! Although the children attending nursery receive lots of fresh fruit on a daily basis, we thought it would be another fantastic role modelling opportunity. Our first attempt at the end of January was a great success and I know that lots of parents and children alike are looking forward to having it again in February and beyond.

At our setting we like to promote diversity and culture and, with this in mind, the Pre-School children have been learning about Chinese New Year. They talked in group time about the different animals each year represents and how this year is the year of the dog. The children then made their own red ‘lucky envelopes’ and put chocolate coins inside which they took home to parents. The children discussed while doing this, how the colour red in Chinese culture is a lucky colour.

Our next exciting project will be our lending library where we will further promote literacy. Children and parents/carers will be able to select and borrow books from the nursery library to read together at home.