July 2021 at Riverview!

What makes us unique

The children in our Pre-School room started the month by discussing what makes them unique. They talked a lot about what they had in common, and also what differences they have. They made faces out of playdough and, at the mark-making table, they drew themselves.

It’s coming home

For the Euros, we had a special football party before the tournament final. The Pre-School children worked together to create a big England flag that we hung up in the garden. In Babies, they experimented with the colour red by playing in red spaghetti, and making lots of marks in the sensory tray with red paint.

Good luck school graduates

July saw us waving goodbye to our first ever Pre-School graduates, and what a lovely bunch they were! We’ll miss them all dearly. To celebrate them finishing at Riverview, we had a ceremony where each of them were presented with a certificate. We then had ice-cream in the garden and some party games to celebrate their achievements.

Sports day fun!

Pre-School also had their very own sports day. Simon from Super Star Sport came in to deliver a session for us and the children had a great time running around, playing with the footballs and participating in the physical challenges. Afterwards, we talked about why exercise is good for us and the effect it has on our bodies.

Tooth Brushing club

As we will soon be starting a tooth brushing club, we have introduced the children to the importance of oral health, and what they can do to look after their teeth.  In an activity to promote good oral health, the children used toothbrushes to clean dirty marks off the teeth model.

We’ve been growing!

As well as brushing teeth twice a day, eating a balanced diet can also help promote good oral health. In the garden, we have had our first harvest of green beans. The children have been enjoying eating these at lunchtimes. The children love watering the plants and learning what makes them grow. Toddlers and Pre-School have both done experiments to see what happened to bean/pea seeds under different conditions. We have found that the seeds that have water and sunlight grow, whereas the seeds without will not.

Our ant world

Toddlers have been looking after their own colony of ants in their ‘ant world’. They enjoy observing the ants in the nest, watching them dig and crawl around.  They watch them walk down the tube of the ant world in the viewing container, where there is food for the ants to eat. We have talked about the types of food ants like; we have found they like sugary fruit and vegetables as this gives them lots of energy.  

We are looking forward to more fun in the sun this summer, and to welcoming our families old and new back in the new term.

Celebrating with Riverview Day Nursery, February 2021!

It has been a very busy month of celebrating! We started the month by supporting Mental Health Week; we practiced some yoga with the children to aid their physical development and to promote them being mindful of themselves. From this we have also purchased some books about being mindful and grateful towards others.

We then went onto celebrate the Chinese New Year by having a lovely Chinese cuisine for lunch. All the children really seemed to enjoy this meal!

Valentine’s Day was next; we shared the love by baking and engaging in many different activities, from using flavoured teabags to imprint different effects and colours onto the paper, to gluing and sticking heart pictures, exploring different shapes and textures.

Pancake Day – my personal favourite! We were very fortunate to have been given a donation of ingredients from Jacks Supermarket to help aid us in celebrating this yummy day. We enjoyed trying lots of different toppings, from a wide variety of fruits to support healthy eating, and also a choice of a yummy treat toppings of maple syrup, or chocolate or strawberry sauce.

Finally, this month we celebrated our 1 year anniversary of officially opening! And what a year it has been!  We had fun marking the occasion with the children and enjoying the delicious cake that Rachel, our Deputy, kindly made for us. Here’s to many more years of Riverview success!

Welcome to Riverview September 2020!

Firstly, I would like to say a big hello from us here at Riverview. We are the fifth branch to be added to the Early Years Care and Education family! We first opened our doors back in February, only to have to close them again in March when the dreaded coronavirus caused the national lockdown. We then re-opened our doors in June and have been welcoming new families through the door ever since, adding employees along the way also. We’re now a staff team of 10 and the number of children attending grows by the week! It’s a real pleasure seeing the setting grow. Both myself and the Deputy previously worked at our branch in Dore, so know what it’s like to have a bustling nursery, and now we’re lucky enough to be running our own!

So, what have we been up to at Riverview so far? Over the past couple of months, we have been exploring our environment, and looking closely at ‘the curiosity approach’ and loose parts. We have really enjoyed developing our outdoor areas and have been investigating den-building, doing our own growing, and focusing on our gross motor skills and physical development by improving our balancing skills for example.

We are even growing our own tomatoes. How exciting.

Inside the building, we have enhanced our loose parts theme and really focused on the interests of the children and extending their learning with what they have shown fascinated with.

We have really enjoyed role play activities and making our own pizzas.

Throughout the past few weeks, we have taken great pleasure in looking after our own caterpillars, who then spread their wings and flew off as beautiful butterflies

That’s all from us for now. We’re really happy to be here and look forward to filling you in more in due course.