May 2021 at Kingswood!

Wow, what a busy month May has been! We have been up to all sorts of things, including celebrating festivals and cultures as well as looking after living things and raising money for charity. Take a look below at some of the amazing activities our children have been engaged in. We have also had fantastic news that Claire, from the Baby Room, has been awarded the Termly Bonus for her dedication, hard work and commitment; well done Claire, enjoy your reward!

May Day

The children used flowers to create ‘May Day’ hats to celebrate the Summer. They had lots of fun discussing the colours they could see on the flowers. The children went outside to see what flowers they could see, and even learnt some flower names such as bluebell, pansy and daffodil.

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Looking after living things

At Kingswood this month our children have shown a real interest in looking after living things, including our nursery fish Pedro and Guppy, as well as our chrysalis’/caterpillars/butterflies. The children also found a snail in the garden, who they were very interested in; they wanted to find the snail a new home in the nursery garden. As this was an interest led by the children, the adults extended the children’s learning through using story sacks/creative activities and providing new vocabulary to learn.

Ramadan and Eid

At nursery this month we have enjoyed learning about Ramadan and Eid. The children learnt that the traditional food that is used to break the Ramadan fast are dates. Using their senses the children enjoyed tasting some dates using describing words such as soft and sticky. ☪️ The children have been busy creating moon pictures in celebration of the Muslim festival of Eid, as the new moon is important in determining when Eid will take place. The children enjoyed exploring the textures and using their fine motor skills to collect all of the different materials to make our moon pictures.

Charity Event for Crackerjacks – PJ Day!

What a cosy day we all had wearing our pyjamas! We enjoyed helping to raise money for Crackerjacks Children’s Charity and the Toddlers even pretended to have some ‘bedtime’ stories 📖 Well done everyone and thank you to all those who helped to raise our incredible total of £305.50 for such a worthy cause.

March at The Little School House

Before the world went crazy over the corona virus we managed to pack in lots of fun activities in & out of the setting…

Each of our branches had a charity takeover week to raise money for Sheffield Children’s Hospital. The plan was to theme as many of the activities around bears, as the hospital is tying it in with the Bear Hunt that’s planned around the city over the Summer. During our chosen week we held a raffle (with some amazing donation prizes – thanks to all who contributed), guessing games to wind a prize and even took the children on a sponsored bear walk, as well as completing lots of bear-themed activities in their rooms with their friends. We want to thank all of the staff, children and parents for their support and donations for this fantastic cause. The week was very successful week and we raised over £800!!

We don’t think our annual celebration of World Book Day would be complete without giving the staff and children the opportunity to dress up as their favourite characters. We saw the likes of The Gingerbread Man, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan and many more! The children loved taking part in reading their favourite stories and making up their own book character, although perhaps their favourite part was enjoying some of the yummy cakes and buns from our bake sale!

Our termly staff training session was held early in the month. Lisa and Anna (Area Manager and Quality Practice Manager) decided to base the first part of the session around a recommendation from our Ofsted inspection (January 2020); the report suggested that we should ‘build on the good planning for adult-led activities to ensure that all participating children are fully challenged.’ So we spent a portion re-looking at what the activities we’re planning to meet the next steps of the children, how to extend them for the more advanced children, what we provide in our areas of continuous provision and how to support the children in order for them to access and achieve things more independently.

We spent the latter half being introduced to a relatively new teaching strategy called ‘Word Aware’. This tool is designed to support practitioners in the provision of effective vocabulary development and it’s aim is to shorten the ‘word gap’ between children from different backgrounds. We discussed how we can implement the strands into our daily practice and how it will work best for the different age groups. We’re looking forward to putting all this into action once things are back to normal!

Our Pre-School Room went on a trip to Weston Park Museum and they used public transport to get to and from. This was a big experience for some of our children, who had not been on a bus before! They enjoyed learning about the different parts of Sheffield’s history and playing in their role play areas.  The children loved looking at the animals after enjoying a yummy picnic for lunch.

Now the weather is starting to get warmer, we’ve been enjoying more sensory activities and activities in the garden. The Baby Room have really enjoyed splashing and playing in the sensory tray with all of the water and bubbles – they had lots of fun splashing the staff too! It’s been great having picnic snacks and lunch in the garden with our friends, and made us very excited for the Summer weather!


That’s all from us for now; we look forward to resuming normal nursery life as soon as possible, but in the meantime, wish you all well – stay safe!

February at Kingswood

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Throughout February Kingswood Day Nursery have been up to lots of fun and exciting activities. Utilising our loose-themed topic of ‘People Who Help Us’ we have invited visitors to the nursery and have been on an exciting trip out to the Old Police and Fire Museum. The children loved the coach journey to the museum and they particularly enjoyed exploring the inside of the ambulances and fire engines.  Our visitors have been DR Vicky Fletcher a local GP who brought all of her equipment for the children to explore and experiment with. They had great fun finding each other’s heartbeats and checking that their friends and carers didn’t have temperatures by using the thermometers!  We also had a visit from local PCSO’s – Adrian Thomson and Samantha Pacey. The Pre-School children particularly enjoyed dressing up in the police uniforms and trying out the hard hats! The PCSO’s shared lots of useful information about what to do if we need help and reminded us of the all important number to call – ‘999’.

We also hosted a charity event at Kingswood last month. ‘Crackerjacks’ is a local children’s charity who we have continually supported throughout the years. This year we raised money by inviting the children of Kingswood to dress up and have a fun princesses and hero’s day! All the children had an amazing day and dressed up as their favourite characters. The toddlers had a great time making masks by gluing and sticking, glittering and being very creative! As you can see from the pictures they did a great job and wore them with pride.

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At our setting we like to promote diversity and culture and, with this in mind, the toddlers have really embraced learning about Chinese New Year.  The children all made their own lanterns which they decorated and took home, as well as all contributing to a group creative activity of making an enormous Chinese Dragon.

We have recently introduced our lending library where we are further promoting literacy. Children and parents/carers can select and borrow books from the nursery library to share together at home. There is opportunity for even more parental involvement as we always welcome additions to the lending library from books that are no longer favourites in your household. This lending library links in beautifully with the promotion of ‘World Book Day’ and we have been able to provide all parents with a token which entitles them to receive a discount on many books from lots of high street shops.

Our upcoming events in the near future will include a ‘Mother’s Day Workshop’ for our Pre-School children, it’s a great opportunity for parental involvement. We have invited mothers, grandmothers and aunties along with any other influential female role models to attend our workshop on Tuesday 6th March 2018, where we will be baking tiffin, threading love heart cards, making flowers, making and moulding salt dough models and much, much more.

We will all be celebrating and supporting ‘Sport’s Relief’ by taking part in running races and other physical games. The babies will be toddling around our soft surfaced play area, throwing, catching and rolling balls to each other. Whilst our toddlers and pre-school children will be taking part in running races, obstacle courses and trying out their throwing skills with target practice games.

We are expecting a visit from Zoolab on 19th April  with their exotic animals.  The children will have the opportunity to look at & hold snakes, spiders & lots of other creepy crawlies! The expected learning outcomes are that children will discover, explore, investigate and ask questions about the different characteristics of the mini beasts and other animals from all around the world.

We look forward to another exciting term of events and will be back to update you further with other exciting activities!

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