The Cottage Nursery, Watchfield

Our Cubs have enjoyed playing with water and ice cubes today. It's much needed in this hot weather!

Today the children in Panthers have been fascinated by the "Mower Men". They have been using tyres and sticks to recreate some of the tools and have been copying the gardeners by mowing the lawn, cutting the hedge and using a strimmer. One of the 'Mower Men' even stopped to teach us about their tools.

A simple activity to support the Tigers fine motor skills, pipe cleaners and colanders for threading.

We are so lucky that a family of Blue T**s have moved into our bird box! If you listen very carefully, you can hear the babies chirping for their parents, who have been very busy flying to and from the nest with food.
The children in Lions were inspired by their bird watching to build their own nests in the grass garden, which they then sat on!

What an exciting morning! 🔥
Zoë, our Forest School lead, visited the nursery this morning to show us how to light a fire! Once the fire pit was ready, she made us all pancakes, which we enjoyed for snack with some sliced apple.
Thank you Zoë for teaching us all about fire safety and cooking some delicious pancakes for snack 🥞

Today we welcomed our caterpillars 🐛 and baby ladybirds 🐞 into Lions and Panthers.
We have created an 'Observation Station' with magnifying glasses and mark making tools to draw observations of what we can see!

This afternoon, the Panthers found a doodle bug (May beetle) on our classroom windowsill. The children were fascinated so we used the laptop to find out more facts about it. Some of the children even drew a picture of the bug and made sure to include it's six legs and fan-like antennae.

🎶 There's a worm at the bottom of the garden, and his name is Wiggly Woo🎶

The children in Lions have created a wormery to observe how worms maneuver under ground. They found soil and leaves for the worms to eat and we have added sand to show how busy the worms are!

We would like to wish lots of luck and cheer on our wonderful Chef Ali and Deputy Manager Naomi who will be running the London Landmarks Half Marathon on Sunday 12th April.

They are both running for some fantastic charities. If you would like to sponsor them, here are the links to their fundraising pages:

Ali will be running for Prostate Cancer UK:
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/london-landmarks-half-marathon-2026-548631?utm_medium=FR

Naomi will be running for The National Autistic Society:
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/naomilucas-68e7fb1bca2696a05fb5ab1b?utm_medium=FR&utm_source=CL&utm_campaign=020

Ali and Naomi, like many of our team, started their running journey using the NHS coach to 5K app and some of us also take part in local Park runs. If you would like to give this a try, here is the link to the park run website to see where your nearest Parkrun is: https://www.parkrun.org.uk/