The Barn Forest School

🌸💐 Little hands, big hearts! 💕

Our preschool children had the most wonderful time visiting the residents at Stainton Way Care Home 🥰 They brought along beautiful cards and flowers to brighten everyone’s day and enjoyed spending some special time together.

The children also loved singing songs for the residents, filling the room with lots of smiles, laughter and happy voices. 🎶❤️ It was so lovely to see everyone joining in and enjoying the music together.

It was truly heartwarming to see the joy on the residents’ faces as the children shared their cards, flowers and songs. 🌷💌 Moments like these are so special. ❤️

Stainton Way 26

🎂Cake baking🎂

Toddlers have enjoyed baking cakes this morning as a special Friday treat! We independently scooped the ingredients, cracked the eggs and mixed the batter👨‍🍳 Although our favourite part was eating our cakes for pudding!😁🧡

🍋Lemonade Making Fun! 🍋

After all that hard work litter picking, the children definitely deserved a well-earned lemonade treat! 🍋

There was just one tiny problem… the lemonade was a little on the sour side! 😂 Some very honest taste testers described it as “sour” and even “bitter”.

Luckily, we didn’t give up! We kept adding some ingredients (mainly sugar) and tweaking until we finally got the perfect balance🍋🥤✨
By the end, the lemonade was just right — sweet, refreshing and definitely worth the effort!

🍃Forest School Fun!🍃

Toddlers have had a blast today during our forest school session! We have planted lots of new and different seeds in our allotment🌻
We also all joined in to build a hammock, and our listening ears blew all the adults away. We followed every instruction carefully and our hammock looked great🤩
Our last job of the session was to have a mini beast hunt to find out what creatures live in our garden🐞 We found worms, ladybirds and lots more! Please ask us about it all tonight 💬

🧑🏾‍🎨EveryBODY is an Artist👩🏼‍🎨

This afternoon Babies have enjoyed body painting, adding cars and balls to extent their exploration by rolling them through the paint to create new marks 🎨

💚 What an amazing morning at The Barn! 💚

This morning our Pre-School and older Toddler children had the most wonderful time taking part in a litter-picking event around Hemlington Lake, helping to raise money for such a fantastic charity - MND Support Group. 🥰🚮

The children worked incredibly hard, getting stuck in, helping to make our local community a cleaner and more beautiful place. They had SO much fun along the way! 🧤🌳✨ It was amazing to see their enthusiasm, teamwork and pride in making a difference.

We would like to say a huge thank you to the wonderful Usher family who invited us to be part of this amazing event. ❤️

A massive thank you also goes to the charity for all the incredible work you do, and to the council and the Mayor for coming along, supporting the amazing event and helping make it such a success.

And lastly a huge thank you to the police that surprised the children with stickers and certificates for all of their hard work. 🥰🎖️ The children were absolutely thrilled!

It was such a fantastic turnout, and we feel so proud to have been a part of it💚
At The Barn, we love being part of our community and showing our children that even the smallest helping hands can make a BIG difference! 🌎💚

What a wonderful morning full of teamwork, smiles, community spirit and lots of fun! 🌿🧤🥰

Well done, everyone! 👏💚

If you have any raised sponsor money, can you bring it into the nursery before next Friday. You can hand in cash directly at the nursery or donate online using the GoFundMe link attached below. ☺️
https://www.gofundme.com/f/jimmy-eddie-litter-pick-for-mnd-cleveland-support-group

P.S. Keep an eye out for photos of us in the gazette 😉

📷Photography Day📸

We had lots of fun taking part in our very own Photography Day! Pre-School became little photographers and made their own cameras before heading out into the garden to explore and take photographs🌿📷

We also created a fun photo booth, where the children enjoyed dressing up, choosing different props and posing for pictures with their friends👗👒
It was wonderful to see their creativity, imagination and confidence shine as they explored photography in a fun and playful way! 📷✨

To finish the day, the children used our nursery phone to take photos with a real camera—and now our camera roll is basically 90% blurry masterpieces 😂📸

👨🏿‍🎓Graduation 2026👩🏼‍🎓

This time of year is always hard as the oldest children are getting ready to leave us and start their school adventure. We obviously couldn't let them leave without first celebrating how far they've come. We're so proud of you, class of 2026...keep being you and trying your hardest and we know you'll smash the next part of your journey.

🏖️Sand Play🏖️

Pre-School explored new ways to play with sand on Tuesday. It started it it’s original form for digging, smoothing, building and piling.
The next activity included adding glue to it to crate textured pictures.
Finally shaving gel was added with the intention of forming a gentle cement for building walls…might need to experiment with the ratio of gel to sand moving forward but the children loved the new feel of it.

🎸Music (wo)man🎸

Yesterday afternoon was just too hot for forest school activities in the garden, so Clare became Campfire Clare with her guitar and a mix of nursery rhymes, Disney songs and smash hits for the children to sing along with and to get up and have a boogie to.