Smiles of Quorn Childcare

Happy Father’s Day 💙 This week the children enjoyed creating special crafts and gifts for the important people in their lives. They made photo frames, decorated shirt and tie cards, created handprint trophies, and designed fun handprint monsters 🎨 We hope all the dads, grandads, stepdads, carers and special father figures enjoy their handmade surprises and have a wonderful Father’s Day ✨

Bookings for our Summer 2026 Holiday Club are now open! With sessions available 27th July – 20th August (Mon–Thurs) ☀️

This summer at Smiles of Quorn, we’re going on an adventure around the world — with each day inspired by a different country, culture and theme 🌍✈️

With a huge variety of activities and plenty of child-led play, every day is different and packed with fun 🎨⚽🧁

This is exactly why we are so passionate about being based just a short walk away from the children’s primary school. That short walk creates a clear transition from the school day into a new environment where children are free to play, relax and explore with their friends. It helps separate “school time” from “club time,” giving children the space to reset and enjoy their time before or after school. It also means, as parents, you don’t have the feeling of dropping off at the school gates first thing and collecting from the same place at the end of the day. Not to mention the health benefits! Walking supports children’s physical and mental wellbeing, improving mood, focus and helping them reach their daily activity levels. And this is exactly why we would never change the walk - it’s such an important part of our routine 🌿✨

Wraparound care has its own purpose, its own value and its own impact.

When you understand it as a space for play, connection and development, everything about your provision shifts. This is where children decompress, build relationships and thrive beyond the classroom.

Learn more about what high quality wraparound really looks like on our website.

www.outofschoolalliance.co.uk

This week some of the children requested the theme of science, becoming mini scientists as they explored 🔬 They enjoyed fun, hands-on experiments 🧪—making rainbows 🌈, slime, watching gummy bears grow, and creating lava lamp effects. It was fantastic to see their curiosity, questions, and excitement as they discovered how things work ✨

This week we celebrated World Earth Day 🌍💚 The children enjoyed creating their own Earth-themed artwork using paint and handprints, making colourful posters, and getting creative with tissue paper to design their own planets. We also planted watercress, helping the children learn about growing and caring for plants 🌱

Join Our Holiday Club Team 🌟

Our holiday club team is growing and we have a number of exciting opportunities to join our fun, friendly, and passionate team!

We are looking for:

👔 Holiday Club Supervisor – a dedicated, enthusiastic and passionate individual with childcare or early years experience, looking to take on a leadership role to support a team in delivering high-quality childcare.

⚽️ Sports Coach – a motivated and energetic individual, ideally with experience of coaching young children in sport, to lead fun and engaging physical activities.

🧸 Inclusion Playworker – a caring and passionate individual with experience of working with children with SEND, to support inclusive play and meet individual needs.

🧩 Play Assistant – a positive and reliable individual looking to develop their skills and begin a career in childcare and early years (ideal for students), to support the delivery of activities and create a fun, safe environment.

If you’re enthusiastic, caring, and love working with children, we’d love to hear from you!

For more information and to apply for any of these roles, please visit:
www.smilesofquorn.co.uk/vacancies or contact us on
[email protected].

Last week in our adult-led activities, we explored World Art Day 🎨 The children used a range of different materials to explore different types of art, including collage, nature art, geometric art, and object printing. They enjoyed getting creative, experimenting with textures, colours, and patterns while expressing their own ideas through their artwork. 🌈✨

There’s something magical about a simple cardboard box… ✨📦

Today the children were given free rein with a pile of boxes and a few extra resources and it was wonderful to see the joy and excitement this sparked ✨

This is known as loose parts play. Using open-ended materials with no set purpose, where children decide what things become and how they are used.

We saw imagination run wild! 🚀 Boxes were transformed into a house and a train with three carriages, while others created a bird house and even a pair of bird binoculars. One group thoughtfully made a friendship box, filling it with little slips of paper with kind messages for others to read, and there was even a bobsleigh built along the way!

The children were completely absorbed in their play, working together, problem-solving, and coming to adults to ask for extra resources to bring their ideas to life 🧠🤝

With no instructions or “right way” to play, children take the lead – developing creativity, confidence, communication and teamwork naturally.

This is what real play looks like 💛