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Baby Sensory Classes

websitebuilder@yell.com — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 14:15:24 GMT

Baby Sensory Classes at Little Owls Nursery...

Award-winning sensory-rich baby development classes for you and your baby coming to Little Owls Nursery every Thursday from 4th November 2021. (3 months to 13 months babies)

Exceptional leaders will provide ideas for creative play, massage, tummy time, movement, visual development, textures, scents and music in simple practical ways that can be easily repeated at home. A combination of original and traditional songs and rhymes will develop early speech and language skills, and sensory signing activities will help you and your baby communicate from birth.

Research shows sensory experiences are the foundations for cognitive development and problem-solving skills. The most miraculous advances in your baby's brain structure occur in the first 3 months of life. During this period, an astonishing 2 million new brain cell connections are created every second. By the end of the first year, your baby's brain will have doubled in volume as a direct result of sensory learning from birth!

Booking Information

Classes are held every Thursday from 09:30 am to 10:15 am (45 minutes long) in our Dormice Baby Room, and are £7.50 a session, booked a term in advance. Please complete the booking form below.

News

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 11:52:32 GMT

The Adventures in Dormice (0-1 Years)

Busy busy time for Dormice welcoming new babies into the room! The focus remained the emotional development of the babies, securing that bond and attachment with the key person in order to feel comfortable and able to start exploring the new environment and start learning.

The babies have been exploring and engaging in a wide array of fun and exciting activities such as ducks in the water tray, sea animals in shaving foam or hair gel, body painting, hiding and finding rattles in shredded paper and soft play. These activities helped with fine motor skills development and with widening the children’s understanding of the world.

This month we will be focusing on a new topic: Summer and Holidays!!!

We will be exploring sand and water play indoors and outdoors, continuously enhancing these activities for better outcomes and more fun and excitement.

The babies will be spending longer in our garden, observing the new summer colours and scents.

We will continue to provide a wide range of messy and art activities, to enable the babies to explore new materials, textures, colours and mark making tools for a more effective fine motor skills development.

Fun Times in Hedgehogs (1-2 Years)

What a busy time for the children in Hedgehogs!

The focus over the past few weeks was on Mathematics, counting and sorting!

The children used various resources to pair and sort by colour and shape, then encouraged everyone to count to 5 or even 10! To support the counting skills further, we focused on looking at and ‘reading’ counting books. This also helped with developing children’s concentration skills and listening and attention. During our Music and Movement sessions, we practised all the counting songs we know: 5 Little Monkeys, 5 Little Ducks went swimming and 5 Little Speckled Frogs.

The children also enjoyed exploring colour and working on colour naming and recognition, by making marks and drawings on our new easels using different mark making tools such as chalk or white board pens. Well done everybody!

Moving forward, we will be introducing a new topic: Summer and Holiday! As well as exploring a wide array of messy and art activities, the children will be exploring the garden more, playing with the water, water painting, observing the new bright summer colour and scents, and learning to look after plants and flowers.

We also plan on making summery sun catchers that the children can take home to decorate their own windows!

Bring on the sun now, that’s all we need!

Getting Creative in Rabbits (2-3 Years)

Wow what a month it has been!

This month we have been talking about people who help us. From making collages, to dressing up, this topic has enabled us to discover the different job roles and what they do to help us. We have also been exploring the garden, planting strawberries and peas. The children absolutely loved helping to water them using their watering cans and watched in awe the changes noticed each week.

This topic also supported thorough discussions on shapes, sizes, textures, colours and numbers, as well as widening children’s understanding of the world.

When exploring our outdoor area, we came across garden worms, spiders, snails, woodlice etc. The children were so fascinated by the wonders of nature that we decided to investigate further by going on a bug scavenger hunt. Amazing!

This term we are going to be focusing on a new topic: ‘Summer and holidays’ with our friend Pirate Jake from the popular cartoon series ‘Jake and the Netherland pirates’. We plan to travel the world with him each week to discover different countries while also taking part in our fun art and messy activities. In addition, the children will be learning more about the ocean and different habitats around the world.

Jake will be starting off in the UK and then traveling all over the globe as we learn about different countries and their cultures.

Spreading their Wings at Owls (3-5 Years)

What a busy couple of months in Owls!

Over the past few weeks, we learnt all about People Who Help Us and the children thoroughly enjoyed this.

In French Club, the children leant the French words for lots of jobs: doctor, nurse, teacher, fireman, policeman, paramedic.

In addition to this, a variety of activities were set out for the children to discover what certain jobs entail. For example, the children really enjoyed exploring construction area, dressing up for the role and building dens and houses. The children also got the chance to become detectives and investigate and find the culprits!

Thank you to all the parents who took part in this topic by providing pictures of their different jobs. Thank you to Cole’s mum who came in to teach the children about becoming a children’s nurse!

The best way to complete this topic was by asking the children what they will like to be when they grow up. The answers were sincere, original, and thoughtful: performer, swimmer and teacher like Abbie and Sarah!

We have had great success with PE club too! The children have mastered the job of getting changed. We have done a variety of warm up exercises and stretches and many group/ team activities. The children are now ready and excited to be doing a proper PE session in School!

School readiness is in full swing. When going into the Outdoor classroom, the children have been grouped with the peers they will be going to school with to strengthen their relationship and offer them more familiarity when taking this big step.

We are learning a new sound/letter every two weeks through Jolly Phonics and everyone is becoming more familiar with this concept. We continue to work on number recognition too.

The Benefits of Music

0014238826 (MOBEEN ASHRAF) — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 11:51:39 GMT

More Attention Is Needed On The Benefits Of Music

The benefits of music are enormous; both consciously and subconsciously music is a part of our everyday life. Children are exposed to music through songs we sing to celebrate birthdays, nursery rhymes, lullabies and songs we sing to our children.

Music helps improve a child’s dexterity and ability it accelerates learning and is advantageous for language cognitive and social development. Learning how to make music should be a basic life skill. Babies can distinguish the differences in melody and frequency stimulating their minds.

Exposure to music helps children to speak more clearly and grow a larger vocabulary. When dancing and moving to music children develop better motor skills. Generation upon generation know the same songs and nursery rhymes. Children recognise the melody of a song and can unscramble the different tones in music before they learn the words. Music helps children to learn new words and the repetition and rhythm help form memories.

There is a wide range of first musical instruments and percussion sets available to support music dance and singing for both indoors and outdoors engagement. Singing in tune marching to a beat dancing helps children to differentiate between their speaking and singing voice and the different rhythms. To neglect music in these early years would be catastrophic.

The Curiosity Approach

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 11:16:57 GMT

The Curiosity Approach is modern-day approach that fits perfectly in current changing technological times

The Curiosity Approach looks to transform and reset educational practice for our youngest children, bringing curiosity, awe and wonder into Early Childhood and creating those ‘thinkers and doers’ of the future.

We are living in a technological age with children spending endless hours engrossed in TV programs or absorbed in Apps on iPad screens.

Children’s lives also (pre-Covid lockdown) have become increasingly busy, with playdates, extra activities, sports events and clubs. The world is changing for our youngest children, not just today but long into their future.

At The Curiosity Approach® our aim is to empower our youngest children, laying down the foundations for the future, to instil a lifelong love of learning, replacing the current gratification of stickers, tick charts and rewards. To stop the pushing down of academics and pouring information into the tops of heads. We believe in educating our children through head, hands and heart, instilling those characteristics of effective learning.

Active learning, critical thinking and enjoyment as children play and learn. To get children outside, to embrace nature and to protect our planet in the process.

The Benefits of Messy Play

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 11:09:55 GMT

Messy play? You either hate it or you love it…. It may be that you accept it, but not in your house, not near your rugs, or shiny furniture or clean sparkly windows…

But that’s ok, it’s perfectly normal, hence why here at Little Owls we don’t care about the mess the messy play creates (the irony!), we just want all children in our care to experience this, to explore it, to enhance it, to love it!

Why we’re doing it and supporting it from the inner core of our hearts?

Yes it’s fun! Nothing beats paint all over our faces, splashes of sticky jelly on our hair, or gloop dripping between our fingers!!!

This helps young children develop their early motor skills, it enhances muscle strengthening ready for early writing skills and definitely works on the hand-eye coordination.

Now think about finding that one big puddle and jumping right in the middle of it… Exactly, it’s scary but exciting…. We don’t know what we’re going to find in the middle of it…. But that’s the thrilling part…. And then, just like that, you jump on it…. How does that make you feel? Free? Released? Exuberated?

Yes, all of those things! For a split second everything stops and it’s just you and the nature…. Greatness, freedom, yet calm and peace.

Children will feel and experience all of those things too, not even realising, and in addition, it builds the gross motor skills, core muscles are developing and strengthening, and they learn that the can move their bodies in different ways…

Messy play helps build on imagination skills. You can do so much mess with little resources, having the same beneficial effects. The possibilities are endless, and the children will always be inspired to try new approaches, to investigate, explore and think, ‘’I wonder what happens if….’’ There are no right or wrong answers, the children will want to discover for themselves, they will turn into curious and inquisitive little people who will always have the confidence to solve problems and keep on trying.

If children develop the characteristics of effective learning during their early years, they will be able to learn later with a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset.

Why Do Some Children Paint All Over Themselves?

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 10:51:31 GMT

Ever wondered why some children just love to paint themselves instead of the paper !

It’s NOT because they are trying to annoy us adults or go against our instructions, to only use the paper to paint on .

Children learn in a multitude of ways and some children have specific ways that they make sense of the world.

Through repetitive actions ( schema) children are finding out, being curious and constantly learning. It’s all part of their learning process and we need to recognise different types of schemas in play.

“A schema is a pattern of repeated actions. Clusters of schemas develop into later concepts" (Athey, 2007). It’s an urge!

To understand that children use play to collect information, and they do this in a methodical, logical and systematic way, through the use of their senses and constant movements. The way children learn through PLAY is incredible!

Just because it doesn’t make sense to us adults - doesn’t mean it’s not making sense to the child. They will use their entire bodies and senses to find out about the world around them, this in turn can also send calming signals to the brain.