New House Farm Childminders

A bit late posting, but we had a fabulous run up to Christmas - a visit to Birkacre Garden Centre, doing Christmas crafts and creating artwork, making reindeer food, watching Keaton in his first school nativity play, decorating and eating gingerbread biscuits, enjoying eating party food and playing games.

Happy New Year 2026 to all my childminder families past and present 🎆🎇

Before Christmas we celebrated St. Andrew's Day by colouring in the Scottish flag and making our own Scotch broth. The children got the chance to use their fine motor skills with child friendly knives (and supervision!). They enjoyed this activity and continued to revisit it by mixing their broth and also introducing the role play area to 'cook' their broth. We spoke about safety whilst using a sharp object, and also continued to reinforce hygiene routines by washing our hands before cooking and eating.

For Bonfire Night we made firework artwork using different tools and techniques e.g. forks, syringes and straws (to blow the paint), cut kitchen roll tubes, bubble wrap, and toothbrushes to dip into the paint to create different patterns. We then added a touch of sparkle with some glitter 🎆🎇

We also made chocolate apple slices (not healthy I know 🤫 All good in moderation) and got to practice our cutting skills 🍏😋

Over the last few weeks we have been discussing Autumn and collecting leaves on our daily walks. We have looked at which trees the leaves have come from, looked at the different colours of the leaves, counted them and done a tally of how many we had in each colour, looked at the patterns we could make with them (including rolling acorns in paint), and made artwork with them 🍁🍂

We have been discussing the topic of Autumn and how and why the leaves change colour.

We explored a sensory Autumn tuff tray by smelling the playdoh (all scented with different smalls e.g. mint, orange, ginger, vanilla and cinnamon), as well as making patterns with the leaves and pine cones we have collected over the past few days on our walks.

Later when Keaton came home from school, him and Cadence made 'pizzas' with the playdoh.

On Monday we went out to collect leaves for some Autumn activities and looked for red leaves for Remembrance Day.

For Remembrance Day yesterday we made poppies with the red leaves we had collected and counted poppies when out on our walk (including poppies on lamp posts, on people's tops and even on their cars). We then visited The Royal British Legion in Lostock Hall to have our photo taken in front of their wonderful mural with the poppies we had made - Royal British Legion

Lest we forget

We did loads for Halloween - painted - secret message paintings and ghosts, carved pumpkins, decorated pumpkin gingerbread biscuits, discussed the different sizes of pumpkins, baked Halloween cakes, danced to music, played party games, did science experiments (watched bicarbonate Halloween figures fizz with vinegar), and ate party food 🎃👻

Celebrating Diwali - the festival of lights

Pumpkin picking ready for Halloween 🎃

For Harvest Festival this year we collected our chicken eggs to make cakes and to put some in our hampers. We also picked apples and pears off our fruit tress, and went shopping for tinned goods etc. We then decorated hampers and made cards for our neighbours. We choose a couple of elderly neighbours to give hampers to.

We were then very surprised to receive a hampers and thank you card back from one of our neighbours ♥️