The Nursery, Holditch Road, Chesterton

At the weekend we celebrated Nicolas birthday (50th 🤫) Working so closely together, with the community and our families, we like to celebrate each other’s milestones and these include big birthdays 🎉

▪️Visiting the Cube in Manchester, we tested our team building skills through different challenges and it became apparent how just competitive Alison is 😀

🍴🍹We spent the afternoon enjoying nice food and drink, ending the experience dancing in an Irish Bar, which is very fitting for our Nicola. Thanks everyone for all that you do at The Nursery and Nicola, we hope that you continue to enjoy your special celebrations

🥦🥕Our allotment is flourishing we have a variety of fruits and vegetables growing that we are excited to share with Wendy who will use them in her new summer menus.

You can tell that lots of love has gone into the allotment from the staff and children. We have enhanced each vegetable patch with name card that have each vegetable in English, Romanian and Polish to reflect the voices of our children. We have even had a vegetable swopping session with a Grandad who kindly gave us some tomato plants for broccoli. 🥦

The toddlers have been out exploring this morning they observed the large yellow flowers on the courgette plant and they were amazed at how tall the broccoli was. We have thoroughly enjoyed our involvement in the pledge more veg campaign so far and today we harvested our first lettuce crop to feature on our cheese deli board 🧀

🦷🪥We are now part of the Brilliant Brushers Scheme that's is offered to support children's oral health. Tracy is our Brilliant Brushers Lead here at The Nursery, she will be talking to all of our families as we roll this out to our 2-3s room.

We are here to help with toothbrushing at home so if you need any support come and speak to Tracy she will offer advice and some top tips 🦷

Celebrating African Art Day 🌍

The children helped to create a Kente Cloth which is worn to symbolise African heritage, unity and pride.

Nicola showed the children photos of people wearing a Kente Cloth and set them a task to create their own interpretation of it. They chose the paint colours and different objects to print various shapes and patterns onto fabric. The children were so proud of their Kente Cloth, sharing it with those who visited their room

👋🏻👃 ‘Sensory Play dough’

Our staff planned this experience for our babies, enhancing play dough with different items including cinnamon and mixed spice.

Play dough offers babies essential sensory exploration, strengthening finger and hand muscles for future fine motor skills like writing. It also helps with language development where we can introduce words such as squish, roll, pat, tear and much more.

🐍🐸🐘🐆🦜🦒Today the staff and children have been celebrating Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday 🎈 🎂

🌍They have learned all about his love of our planet, conservation and wildlife through activities, play and exploring our enhanced environments

🥣 A new feature on our summer menu is overnight oats. Testing this was popular with our children, as they were introduced to new textures and taste.

Here is the recipe for you to try at home :

Ingredients
1/2 cup (40g) Porridge Oats
1/2 cup (125ml) Yoghurt
2/3 cup (160ml) Milk
1 tbsp of Chia Seeds
1-2tsp honey
Pinch of Cinnamon (optional)

Instructions:

The night before, mix your oats in a bowl with the yoghurt, milk, chia seeds, honey and cinnamon (optional)

Cover and pop in the fridge
The next day top with your chosen toppings

As we embark on being sustainable in our practice Wendy is focusing on this in the kitchen by turning leftovers into something new. We had some overnight oats left so to put them to use Wendy made some oat and date biscuits.

If you have any overnight oats mixture left you can add half a cup of oats (this may vary depending on how much mixture you have left) to the mixture and add chopped dates. ?