Handkerchief Day Nursery

We are holding our fantastic Celebration Day on Saturday 30th March at nursery. There will be lots of activities on offer, a chance to talk to our Health Tots Leads about the accreditation, samples from our new summer menu and The Grand Opening of our new Forest School Cabin!!

Our Tweenie children have been using herbs to smell and feel the different textures. They then used them to make their marks on a big canvas to produce a work of art!

Our Forest School team have had a weekend away at a ‘Relax, Renew and Rewild’ retreat in Witham. A few of the activities they did were sacred crafting, community singing, botanical printing, woodland walks, developing their connection with nature and camp fire songs in the dark!! As well as networking with other likeminded souls from other walks of life. #forestschoolteamontour #feelinginspired

Over the last few months our Toddler children have been listening to different types of music whilst experimenting with paints. This time the children listened to calming Japanese music. The children slowly covered the cling film with paint, making gentle and slow marks in front of them. Some of the children sat in the middle of the table painting inside. They painted the parts they had already painted on the outside.

Happy Chinese New Year to all celebrating today! At Handkerchief all of our rooms (and Forest School) have been busy with amazing activities, painting, mark making Chinese numbers, making a dragon, rice and noodle sensory experiences, dragon dancing and much more! For lunch the children and practitioners enjoyed noodles and sweet and sour chicken, with prawn crackers!!

In babies we have been working on sensory play and finding different ways to incorporate it in their play. For this activity we used a selection of flowers, leaves and twigs to paint with! The babies were eager to get involved and engaged throughout the messy play, having beaming smiles on there faces.

The children have been learning how to sew today which is helping to improve their hand eye coordination and fine motor skills. We also talked about the colour threads and needles they were using. When we have filled the hessian sheet we are going to hang it on the wall and it will look beautiful!

The Big Garden Birdwatch took place at the beginning of the week, and our Forest School children took part in counting up how many birds they could see. We also encouraged our families to join in at home over the weekend, and many of the children were very excited to come and tell us how many and which birds they had spotted at home. At Forest School we are always looking after the birds that nest in and around us. We feed them, make sure there is water and have made them many nests in our apple trees. Last week we made a bird spotting area so the children could watch as the birds came to eat the food. We also make bird feeders to take home and put in their gardens too.

Just before Christmas our pre-schoolers started to make their own stages at Forest School and also inside using our big blocks. To extend this line of inquiry with the children we created our own stage inside. The children found props from around the room, dressing up, hats, puppets etc. They even produced their own backdrop of pictures, photos that they then stuck on the wall. One of the children even brought in a magicians outfit from home that he shared with lots of the other children. This was then extended by using a 'green screen' so that the children could create their own backgrounds for the videos they made using the iPads. Watch this space for more show time!!

Had a lovely meeting with Beth from The Hypnobirthing Way yesterday. For more information, please visit her Facebook page The Hypnobirthing Way

On Sunday some of the Toddler and Pre-School families went to visit New Walk Museum in Leicester to see their dinosaur collection!! The children loved seeing the Rutland Dinosaur along with many more dinosaurs that were on land and in the sea. Thank you to everyone that joined us. We have taken back lots of photos to show the children and extend their dinosaur project.

We love Laura and Jo joining us at Forest School on a Thursday morning. We think they secretly like going home smelling of camp fires!!

Don’t forget our Christmas Market on Saturday 8th December 3pm-6pm at Handkerchief Nursery. We have lots of wonderful stalls supporting local businesses, Jo Jingles and French will be here to entertain the children and not forgetting a visit from the big man himself- Santa!

Our ‘Wild about Wool’ workshop yesterday was very therapeutic and relaxing. Whilst we were there we purchased a starter kit for us to bring back to introduce to our children. We made 3 forest gnomes that will be our Forest School mascots. Here's the ones we made yesterday...

Over the last few weeks the children have shown a great interest in our pumpkins in our home corner and Autumn tuff spot. We cut open two large pumpkins for the children to see the inside of, and they took it in turns to scoop out the seeds. With those seeds and with very brightly coloured orange playdough the children then had a go at moulding their own pumpkins. They also used rosemary to add on top for pumpkin storks.

Our Forest School Team have spent the day at Park Farm in Ibstock at an Outdoor Learning and Forest School Skills day. They attended different workshops including wild about wool, natural fire lighting, waterproof fairies, getting creative with tools, tarps knots and kit, and teaching trees. They’re looking forward to sharing their new skills within Forest school back at nursery.

Experimenting with playdough has been a popular experience in pre-school. The children were given the ingredients to experiment with and came up with all sorts of wonderful variations of playdough all by themselves!

Play dough is an important resource of the early years environment. As part of simple, tactile play it can be squashed, squeezed, rolled, flattened, chopped, cut, scored, raked, punctured, poked and shredded! Each one of these different actions aid fine motor development in a different way, not to mention hand-eye co ordination and general concentration. And as soon as you add another element to it, the list of benefits and creative play possibilities continues to grow!

Happy Diwali to all our families celebrating this weekend.

Such a great nursery my girls have been going there for 5 years , staff are amazing and so glad I found you 5 years ago would highly recommend xx

Our daughter attended for 2 1/2 years she loved every second and grew and learnt so much. She starts school monday but we arent worried as handkerchief have set her up for life xxx �� we thank them all so much and cant wait to return with our little boy xx

My little girl attended Hankercheif since 9 months to 3 1/2y. I found this nursery was great with lots of opportunities for the little brains to develop. You can't compare this to other nurseries has outstanding rating because this is beyond outstanding.

My daughter loves it here. She's learning loads and is always excited and engaged with the things that they do.

Brilliant nursery with excellent staff. I feel safe in the knowledge that my son will be well looked after and will be given a variety of activities to do to help his development. Would highly recommend it .

Such a great nursery my girls have been going there for 5 years , staff are amazing and so glad I found you 5 years ago would highly recommend xx

Our daughter attended for 2 1/2 years she loved every second and grew and learnt so much. She starts school monday but we arent worried as handkerchief have set her up for life xxx �� we thank them all so much and cant wait to return with our little boy xx

My little girl attended Hankercheif since 9 months to 3 1/2y. I found this nursery was great with lots of opportunities for the little brains to develop. You can't compare this to other nurseries has outstanding rating because this is beyond outstanding.

My daughter loves it here. She's learning loads and is always excited and engaged with the things that they do.

Brilliant nursery with excellent staff. I feel safe in the knowledge that my son will be well looked after and will be given a variety of activities to do to help his development. Would highly recommend it .