Charlie Farley's Nursery

We love it when kindly gift us flowers to use in the nursery. 🌸

The children gain so much learning through exploring real flowers in their play. They use them in water play to create magical potions, mix them into play dough, and investigate their textures, scents, and colours.

Recently, we explored colour transfer by placing flowers onto paper and gently hammering them to reveal the beautiful natural pigments hidden inside. The children were fascinated as the colours appeared and transformed their artwork.

Using natural resources like flowers encourages creativity, curiosity, sensory exploration, scientific thinking, and imaginative play. It’s amazing how one simple gift can inspire so many different learning opportunities across the nursery. 🌺🌼🌿

🌿🪱 Mud play is such a valuable part of childhood! As the children explored the mud with their hands, they discovered worms wriggling beneath the surface, sparking curiosity and excitement. Digging, scooping, squeezing, and searching through the mud helps to develop fine motor skills, hand strength, sensory awareness, and thinking.

Finding worms encourages children to observe, ask questions, and learn about the natural world around them. Most importantly, muddy play provides endless opportunities for imagination, exploration, and fun! Perfect for little hands, big discoveries, and lots of muddy smiles! 😊🌱

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☀️💦 What a heat wave we are having! Luckily we have air conditioning to keep us cool, along with a shady garden and lots of water play to help everyone stay comfortable. We have had the pool out too, which has brought lots of splashing, laughter and fun for the children. 💦☀️

Play dough is an important part of early years learning and development and is something we provide every day as part of our continuous provision. Through play dough, children develop a wide range of skills while exploring in a fun, hands-on way.

Using play dough helps to strengthen the small muscles in children’s hands and fingers, supporting fine motor development which is important for later skills such as writing, drawing, using scissors and self-care tasks like fastening buttons and zips. Rolling, squeezing, pinching, poking and cutting the dough all help to build these muscles naturally through play.

Play dough also encourages creativity and imagination. Children use their own ideas to create models, pretend food, animals, people and patterns. Open-ended resources alongside the dough such as cutters, loose parts, natural materials and tools help extend their learning and problem-solving skills.

It is also a fantastic sensory experience. Children explore different textures, smells, colours and shapes which supports sensory development and can be calming and regulating for many children. Adding herbs, spices, flowers, glitter or natural materials can further enhance the experience and encourage curiosity.

Play dough promotes communication and language as children talk about what they are making, describe textures and share ideas with their friends and adults. It also supports social skills through turn taking, sharing tools and working collaboratively together.

Mathematical learning is naturally explored through play dough too. Children count objects, compare sizes, make patterns, explore shapes and talk about concepts such as bigger, smaller, longer and shorter.

Having play dough available every day allows children to revisit and build on their skills independently at their own pace. Daily access gives children the confidence to explore familiar resources in new ways and supports their individual interests.

🧱 This is so much more than a tower……. Watch to find out why. 🧱

✨ There is so much you can do with flour. It’s a wonderful sensory activity for mark making, sprinkling from above, and clapping hands to watch it turn into a soft mist. In baby room we use flour as part of lots of different activities, encouraging exploration, curiosity, and sensory development through play. ✨

💦✨ The babies have enjoyed exploring the water and reflection balls, with lots of splashing and sensory play. They loved watching the reflections and movements in the water while developing their curiosity and coordination through play. ✨💦

🇯🇪 Happy Liberation Day 🇯🇪