Ashbourne Day Nurseries at Swanbourne

Tomorrow is Pyjama Day at Swanbourne Nursery!
We are supporting Red Nose Day with a Pyjama Party and lots of fun learning opportunities set out for your children to take part in 🤩

We have new calves on the farm! 🐮

This week we will be taking a walk across to the farmyard to see the new calves as they settle into their surroundings.

Our toddler room has also been exploring imaginative play with this farm themed tuff tray!

The below copy is shocking but true and we want to share content to help prevent, support, and educate our families ❤❤❤
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Safer sleep for babies, Support for families 👶😴

“The Lullaby Trust raises awareness of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), provides expert advice on safer sleep for babies and offers emotional support for bereaved families 💙
We know that greater awareness of safer sleep leads to a decrease in the number of babies dying.

Sadly around 3 babies a week still die from SIDS and if all parents were aware of safer sleep advice many lives could be saved. Around 700,000 babies are born every year in the UK and we need to continue to reach out to all new parents with our life-saving message.”

For more information please visit: https://www.lullabytrust.org.uk/about-us/safer-sleep-week/

Our Pre-school children have been helping Cindy, Laura and Liz today at the allotment!
They have been busy digging the soil ready to plant our new vegetable seeds!

🥕 🍅 Food growing can teach children about soil, nutrition, science and the life cycles of the vegetables and creatures in the garden. 🥬 🫘

As children garden, they develop important motor skills that will help them improve their academic skills such as writing, cutting and typing. It's also a well-known fact that if you engage children in growing their own vegetables, they gain a keen interest in eating them too! 🍽

Today our toddlers took Pancake Day outside!
Cindy set out this fantastic tuff tray for our children to explore a range of natural materials to create their pancakes.. we love being outside and incorporating our environment in our daily activities. This was lots of fun!

Chelsee and Fran are celebrating their 1 year Anniversary here with us at Swanbourne Nursery! 💕

Thank you both so much for the care and commitment you show us everyday! We truly appreciate all that you do!

We have had so much fun this valentines week with lots of beautiful activities creating love potions, crafting valentines cards and modelling love bugs with playdough.. 💕
We have read lots of stories and talked about the people that are special to us this valentines week.
Here are some photos of what we have been up to 💕

Here at Ashbourne Day Nurseries keeping all our children safe is our top priority! ❤
Our staff are our biggest asset, and we want to highlight how amazingly well they dealt with a first-aid situation recently 🩺
Reading a parents review really validates what we work so hard for 🙌
Spreading staff love this Valentine’s week ❤
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A HUGE congratulations to Lucy on passing her level 3 qualification in the early years workforce! Today she received her certificate and we are excited for the journey ahead of her here at Ashbourne 🌟🌟
Well done Lucy!!

Congratulations to Holly and Toni! 🌟

Toni received Employee of the Month for December 2022 for her continuous hard work and dedication to her role! She has fantastic activity ideas which capture the childrens interests and curiosty, and consistently makes an effort to improve childrens learning opportunities.

Holly received employee of the month for January 2023 for her enthusiasm and positive presence in the room. No task is too small and she often gives above and beyond to help her team.

Well done girls! You are both incredible and we value everything you do 💕

January 31st was national hot chocolate day! ☕️

Our babies took part in this sensory play tray created by Liv.
They explored textures, developed motor skills and practiced their hand-eye coordination through pouring, filling and emptying.

Today Toni created this beautiful tuff tray in Preschool! 🌸 🌺

This learning opportunity invited children to explore natural materials and join discussions around being kind and gentle. This activity was focused on the storybook “Kindness grows”. We took turns and shared resources building friendships with our peers.

The children then made bunches of flowers for their family and friends and we spoke of those special to us 🫶🏽🫶🏽

Our Team passed their Paediatric First Aid Training.
Well done Team 🌟

It is so important to be educated on the welfare and safety of children by being Paediatric First Aid trained. Knowing the basic first aid procedures to allow you to conduct effective first aid is vital.

Well done everyone!

Save the date… 📚

Did you know that filling, scooping and pouring activities help to develop fine motor skills in under 5s. This is also a great learning opportunity to introduce math concepts such as less and more. These tasks help children coordinate their hand movements with what they are seeing and feeling.

This image is of a filling, scooping and pouring activity set out in our Kittens room this week.

Well done to our Chef at Swanbourne for maintaining our 5🌟 rating after a spot check visit from the EHO! Woo!

Sensory Play - Beach Tuff Tray ☀️
This week in Owls we have been exploring sensory play through this beautiful tuff tray.
They created this scene with textured materials, sand and cereal. The small world animals crushed the cereal making a “crunch” sound and we explored descriptive language and first words.

The children in our Kittens Room have been super creative baking a range of cereal cakes. This activity encouraged sensory exploration and the development of fine motor skills through scooping and transporting. They colour matched the cupcake cases and developed their descriptive language with Toni.

Lest we forget 🥀

Preschool have been exploring transient art this week and today we looked at the signature red poppy for Remembrance Day.

Transient art encourages children to explore shape, space, pattern, positioning, colour, texture and overlapping..

Dinosaur ice play! 🦕🦖

Preschool have been super busy exploring this Dino-Tuff Tray! Mixing paint with water before the blocks were frozen, the children were able to paint as the ice melted! We experimented with mixing our primary colours to create secondary colours and used the paint brushes to free the dinosaurs that were stuck in the ice!

Today we celebrated National World Science Day.
We linked this in with the children’s interest in dinosaurs and explored Volcanos! The children each had a turn at experimenting with vinegar and bicarbonate soda to create a reaction. How cool! 🧪

Today Chelsee set up this beautiful small world learning opportunity in our toddler room for the children to explore.. they pushed the cars along the road, mimicked traffic and animal sounds and practiced their sharing and turn taking skills 💕🚘

Employee of the month for October 2022 ⭐️

Congratulations to Georgia!
Georgia was nominated as Octobers employee of the month for her constant hard work and dedication to her role. She always go above and beyond to create a calm and stimulating environment in the toddler room. She has fantastic activity ideas and often leads beautiful and educational group time sessions.
Well done Georgia! Very well deserved 🥰

Emily’s Pumpkin Soup 🧡🎃
Preschool took part in Emily’s spooktacular pumpkin soup play this week! After reading a story written by Helen Cooper, the children held an open discussion on how to make their own pumpkin soup.
They developed their language skills by naming and labelling a list of ingredients. They then explored and discussed their senses, touch, taste, smell and sight.

Well done Team Ashbourne!🤩

Emily, Jade and Molly all took part in the Swanbourne Endeavour this morning and completed the 5k cross country course! An amazing effort! Well done team 🏅 🤩

Spider slime 🕷
Take a look at Toni’s incredible messy play opportunity!

Toni created this with jelly to encourage her children to explore their senses and develop their fine motor skills by digging for spiders!

Half term is approaching fast!
We will be offering our first of many outdoor stay and play sessions.
These are sessions for you and your child to come along to and enjoy the outdoors, as well as exploring the world around us! 🌳🌱
Our first session will be Tuesday 25th October 9:30-11:00 a.m.
If you have any questions, please email [email protected]

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Construction day in our Owl babies room.

Today we’re celebrating Autumn!
Look at Georgia’s amazing autumnal tuff tray!

Georgia’s learning intention was to promote sensory exploration and support fine motor skills. 🍂🍃

This week is National Space Week! 🪐☄️
Today, Lucy and Chelsee decorated biscuits with our toddler room.. using coloured icing and hundreds and thousands to resemble planets such as our planet, earth 🌍.
Mixing the icing together to create a marble effect and adding lots of “star dust” using sprinkles.

Congratulations to our AMAZING deputy manager, Emily!
You always work hard with the children at the centre of everything you do! You are incredible! 🌟👏🏻
Well deserved recognition for all that you do 🥰

Congratulations to our AMAZING September icons!

⭐Emily is an icon this month for being a fantastic deputy manager and always role modelling good practise.

⭐Savannah is an icon because she is so passionate and dedicated to her role. She has been amazing managing Bricket Wood and we appreciate all her hard work.

⭐Claire and Katie are icons, for going above and beyond for Hertford nursery. They are fantastic role models and create a warm and welcoming atmosphere at our Hertford setting.

⭐Louise is an icon because she does such a fantastic job project managing, working so hard with our new systems and just being great!

⭐Rashika is an icon because she was an absolute superstar on the Ofsted nominated day, but mainly for her upbeat attitude and passion

WELL DONE EVERYONE ❤

Playing outside gives children the chance to explore their natural environment and have adventures. The sense of freedom playing outdoors gives is fantastic for a child’s physical and mental development.

Outdoor play supports children’s problem-solving skills, creativity and provides opportunities to develop their imagination, inventiveness and resourcefulness. At our Allotment area, our children can play games, test their physical limits and build their self-confidence. We are so lucky to have such a beautiful natural area to explore.. look at what we’ve been up to this month 🤩

This week the children in our toddler room have been busy collecting natural materials to create art from our outdoor spaces. They collected a basket of sticks, bark, twigs and pine cones. 🍃🪵
Focusing at first on the development of fine motor skills, the children practiced their pincer grip to collect these items and then paint with them as part of an art activity.
Extending this, they then started to look at the textures and colours of media in front of them and it proved to be a great learning opportunity to support childrens speech and language development.

How amazing is this Jurassic park themed tuff tray created by Issy?! 🦖 ⛰

Using oats, baked beans and crazy foam, this activity offered opportunities for the children to explore different textures and descriptive language. We supported fine motor skills by using tweezers to move and count the beans. As well as focusing on embedding mathematical skills by regconising numbers, counting from 1-5 and using language such as ‘more than’ and ‘less than’.

Take a look at Preschools pamper morning 💅🏼

What a beautifully relaxing morning in Preschool! We played calming music whilst we had a foot bath to soak our aching feet. We used cucumber to soothe our eyes and each had the opportunity to paint our nails using a nail 'varnish' made from crushed chalk and water!

Blackberry picking this morning 💜

Taking children fruit picking not only exposes them to the outdoors but gives us the opportunity to teach them agriculture and science too.
We talked a lot about what the blackberry bush needs to thrive and how we need to be careful when harvesting the fruit.
We discussed the difference between fruits and vegetables and how farmers protect their crops from weather.

The blackberries we picked came back to Nursery with us for our morning snack!
Our next mission is to make blackberry crumble 💜

This week at Nursery, Foals had lots of fun building some butterfly wings as a team with Sarah! We talked about the different types of butterflies that we might see flying outside, such as a 'red admiral' or 'peacock' and what plants butterflies like to collect nectar from, such as the buddleia in our Toddlers garden. We also talked about the big butterfly count. Our Preschool then got to work, helping to choose and cut different coloured cellophane to cover the shapes on the wings that Sarah had cut out. We discussed the different shapes that we could see and couldn't wait to try the wings in the garden - it left a beautiful pattern on the floor and made our shadows looked like a beautiful butterfly!