Our Blog.
Welcome to our blog. Here you’ll find news, updates and events relating to Little Cedars Day Nursery along with useful articles and information about childcare, parenting, nursery life, Streatham and early years education.
Contact Us
Little Cedars Day Nursery
27 Aldrington Road
Streatham
London
SW16 1TU
020 8677 9675
Email us here
Opening Times
The nursery is open
7.45am to 6.15pm
Monday to Friday
(Except Bank Holidays,
Christmas Week &
1 inset day per term)
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Latest Posts
Nursery Jokes For Under-5s
Following on from our post about the importance of laughter for children earlier this month, we thought it only fair to lend a hand with some laughter! With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of some of our favourite, funniest, jokes for preschoolers. Feel free to share these, send the page link to your friends and family or print them out for display (click each one to see a larger version). We adults at Little Cedars Day Nursery also found ourselves chuckling at each and every one of them — indeed they only made it into our list if we laughed out loud! Have fun with them — there are 24 to enjoy and to share on social media like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest ‘pins’ and so on …
Laughter for Little Ones – & Why it’s So Essential
Have you seen the videos of babies laughing hysterically when paper is torn? For some inexplicable reason, they find it hilarious! It even became a whole trend on YouTube, so we’ve included an example here (skip any adverts at the beginning). It’s extremely funny — and the giggling baby is very cute!
Quite why the babies laugh at paper being torn, or during a game of peek-a-boo with a parent, is often a mystery. They seem to love it, though. It turns out that their ensuing laughter is very good for them, as well as being enormous fun to watch and to join in with.
Growing a Sense of Humour
The Benefits of Laughter for Little Ones
Many of the benefits of laughter are completely obvious; it cheers us up, it lightens our mood, it can make a stressful situation much more bearable and, no less importantly, laughing is fun! If we’ve laughed regularly throughout the day, we’re more likely to have enjoyed the day as a whole and we’re sure to think of it as a ‘good’ day. It’s going to be similar for babies, toddlers and under-fives.
However, there are many less obvious benefits that the very young can get from laughing regularly:
Medical benefits
There are also some medical benefits for children who laugh often. Research shows that
FREE Food, Milk & Vitamins! A Guide to the Healthy Start Scheme
At time of writing, the free items are available through vouchers that can be redeemed in any of the 21,000 or so physical shops, supermarkets and pharmacies that have signed up to accept them. Each voucher is currently worth £3.10 and you can get 1 every week if you are pregnant or have a child aged between 1 and 4 years of age, or 2 vouchers per week if your child is under 1.
So, what free stuff can you get?
The Importance of Sleep for Babies & Toddlers
What are the benefits of a good night’s sleep to children?
Sleep has enormous benefits to the young and old and it has been the subject of many studies. Young children who get a decent night’s sleep are shown to:
How much sleep should young children and babies get?
Studies suggest the following recommendations when it comes to the number of hours of sleep that children should regularly receive during their early years …
Recommended sleep time
Source: Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) / The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM)¹
Sleep Hygiene
‘Sleep Hygiene‘ is a term that refers to the whole routine around bedtime and sleeping, including important preparation measures during the run-up to bedtime A good sleep hygiene regime will help children get to sleep and to sleep soundly.
Parents can help to optimise children’s sleep quality in a number of ways: …
Your Toddler Needs to Go to Nursery. Here’s Why.
Results of a Department for Education (DfE) study released in February 2020 highlight the benefits of attending early childhood education and care, all in incredible detail. We took a look at their 145 page report and picked out some of the key findings.
Benefits of attending Early Childhood Education & Care (ECEC)
According to the DfE study, early childhood education and care has both short- and long-term positive effects on the educational, cognitive, behavioural and social outcomes of children. That’s no mean feat. A good educational grounding for under-fives is also shown to result in more positive social behaviour, better behavioural self-regulation, lower instances of emotional issues and less peer problems.
Some of these benefits are even more pronounced for disadvantaged children who start to attend formal ECEC sessions no later than the age of two. The DfE impact study shows that 2-year-olds benefit most if they …
Fighting Obesity in Under-5s
The shocking statistics
Childhood obesity is important to address because the National statistics are quite shocking:
The link between background and obesity
Statistics from studies show that children living in deprived areas are most at risk from developing weight problems. Low-income families are affected the worst and in fact the risk of obesity in five year olds in low-income families is twice that of their more affluent counterparts. By the time they reach the age of eleven, the risk increases to three times for the children from poorer backgrounds.
What can parents do to help?
Parents can also help by ensuring that their children get regular exercise. This can be done through lifestyle choices that can be instilled into children from a very early age. For example, playing sports, gym exercise, walking, hiking and other physical activities. Indeed, research shows that building an active lifestyle that also involves healthy eating choices is one that can stick with the children even into adulthood.
The positive impact of exercise
Ensuring children get enough exercise is incredibly important in the fight against childhood, and indeed adult, obesity. After all, usually at the heart of obesity is a mismatch between the energy taken in as food/drink and the energy expended via physical activity.
However, regular exercise has many other potential benefits aside from the management of physical weight and body mass. These include:
Healthy Eating for Under-Fives — A Complete Guide
What should children be eating as part of a healthy lifestyle?
As a rough guide, toddlers need three meals per day plus two or three snacks. They also need to drink six to eight drinks per day.
Young children need a balanced diet, i.e. one that gives them all the elements that they need to remain healthy and thrive. There are four main food groups that form a good basis of healthy living. A rough guide is to try and include something from each food group in every meal, or within their snacks. The four core food groups are:
How big is a portion?
Make sure you give the correctly sized food portions. As a rule of thumb, one portion is generally about the size of
Free Childcare via Universal Credit: A Complete Guide
Firstly, what is Universal Credit?
Universal Credit is a Government funding system that was introduced in 2013 to simplify the welfare payment system. In essence, it helps people with their living costs, for example if they’re on low incomes or are not working. It also potentially includes funding for childcare, to help parents with the costs of looking after dependent children (more about that later). The scheme’s aim is to eventually replace 6 existing benefits** into a single, unified payment scheme. Payments are made monthly in England (sometimes twice a month in Scotland).
How much can you get towards childcare with Universal Credit?
If you are eligible, you may be able to reclaim up to 85% of childcare costs through Universal Credit. The most you can reclaim each month is usually £646 for one child or £1,108 for two children unless there are exceptional circumstances. You may also be able to claim for additional children under the scheme, but only if they were born before 6th April 2017. If eligible, you can claim for dependent children up to the 31st of August following their 16th birthday.
Your payments for childcare costs under the scheme are usually paid in arrears. This means you will need to pay the costs yourself and then claim the money back through your Universal Credit claim.
The amount you are paid in your job, if you have one, can affect how much your Universal Credit payments will be. If your earnings are more than usual in an “assessment” period, this can reduce your