News blog for Little Cedars Day Nursery, Streatham. Latest posts etc.

11 Super Sensory Activities for Under-Fives

18 January 2021/in Activities, Childcare, Early Years Education, Learning through play, Nurseries, Nursery, Pre-schools, Preschool, Preschoolers, Sensory Play, Streatham /by Mark

In our last blog post we wrote a guide to the many benefits of sensory play. Take a look at that article for a reminder of how stimulation of the senses can help with the learning and development of babies and young children, in a myriad of different ways. From improved problem-solving and language skills to safer movement, better social skills, helping with autism and much more, the many benefits of sensory play are clear to see in that article. Follow the blue link above to take a look.

We promised to follow up with a post suggesting some sensory-based activities that parents or carers can undertake with babies or children at home. Our ideas below are great fun for babies, toddlers and children under five and such sensory activities can benefit them greatly.

Safety note: of course, you should always supervise your baby/child’s play and discovery to ensure they do not unwittingly harm themselves. Babies, for example, will often use their mouths, as well as their hands, to explore new objects, so remain vigilant and supervise them appropriately.

Sensory Play Ideas for Babies

• Babies love playing with bubbles. Under supervision, let them see the bubbles float slowly through the air and occasionally land without bursting. The baby will be able to see the rainbow colours swirling on the bubble surface, particularly when in flight. Babies will also enjoy it when a bubble lands on their skin with the most delicate of sensations, then another sensory ‘ping’ when it finally bursts. Bubbles stimulate sight and touch as well as giving babies a glimpse of some of the simple but magical things that the world has to offer.

The Benefits of Sensory Play for Under-Fives

1 January 2021/in Activities, Childcare, Early years, Early Years Education, Learning through play, Nurseries, Nursery, Pre-schools, Preschool, Sensory Play, Streatham, SW16 /by Mark

Sensory play is incredibly important for under-fives. Babies and young children benefit enormously when their play activities stimulate the senses and in this article we’ll explore those benefits in some detail.

The Senses

For the purpose of this blog post, ‘senses’ will mean the famous five (touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing) plus a couple of others that are often overlooked; balance and body awareness (also known as ‘proprioception’). As with the core 5 senses, the two additions are critically important as part of the learning and development journey for little ones.

What is Sensory Play?

Sensory Play is any kind of play activity that involves stimulation of any of the senses outlined above. For example:

activities that involve touch, where babies and children can acquaint themselves with the feelings of temperature, softness, hardness, pressure, vibration, roughness, smoothness etc.;
activities involving food, which can involve tasting to see whether the food is sweet, sour, savoury and so on;
play activities involving smell, which involve items that have a scent, whether natural like flower petals, fruit, organic materials and suchlike or man-made scents like diluted bubble bath and so on;
visual (sight) activities, where children explore colours, tones, visual textures, contrast, brightness and images, learning how to associate them with the real world;
hearing activities, where children experience the different types of sounds that surround them;
play activities that help them to learn to balance i.e. to counteract the effects of gravity;
activities that help children to develop a sense of spacial awareness i.e. of where their bodies are within their surroundings and in relation to objects and other people around them.

The Benefits of Sensory Play

Sensory play allows children to learn more about the world around them, and all the things within it. As they learn, new pathways are formed within the brain and this helps to cement permanent associations between a particular sense and a particular situation, physical thing, or scenario. When this is achieved, the child will instantly and naturally recognise multiple layers of senses as they happen again in the future. That’s an important life skill and something that adults take for granted, but benefit from enormously.

Additional benefits of sensory play for children include …

The Complete Guide to Choosing a Nursery

15 December 2020/in Childcare, Early years, Early Years Education, Nurseries, Nursery, Pre-schools, Preschool, Streatham, SW16 /by Mark

One of the key challenges that affects parents is how to choose the best nursery or pre-school for their little one. Babies can go to nursery at just a few months old and Government funding for childcare kicks in from as early as 2 years of age. So, the choice of nursery is a decision that, for many, needs to be made very early in a child’s life.

What is the best way of choosing the most appropriate nursery or pre-school for your child? What factors should be taken into consideration? This guide clearly explains the key considerations and provides a useful road map to find the perfect nursery or pre-school match for an individual child.

A Convenient Nursery Location

The most obvious factor to consider is location. After all, you will usually want your child’s nursery or pre-school to be close to either your home or place of work — or somewhere en route — so they’re easy to drop off and pick up. With a quick Google map search for nurseries in your desired area, you’ll already be able to generate a great list of possible contenders.

Social Proof

While you’re still on the search results page, you can check how well the various nurseries have been reviewed on Google. Little Cedars has an average rating of 4.4 out of a possible 5 stars on their Google listing, for example — that’s very good. If you dig a little deeper, you can see that, of the 7 total customer reviews, 4 of them were rated at the full 5 stars, which again is extremely good. You can also see any comments with some reviews, where people left them. In our

Nursery Jokes For Under-5s

26 November 2020/in Activities, Childcare, Children's Jokes, Early years, Health, Learning through play, Nurseries, Nursery, Pre-schools, Preschool, Preschoolers, Streatham, Under-5s /by Mark

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

16 November 2020/in Activities, Childcare, Early years, Early Years Education, Health, Learning through play, Nurseries, Nursery, Pre-schools, Streatham, Under-5s /by Mark

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

Let’s first go back to the beginning. A sense of humour is apparently a learned aspect of a person’s character, to a fair extent. It’s something that develops and changes as a child gets older, rather than something they’re born with as a result of their DNA. As such, it’s important that babies and young children are given every opportunity to enjoy laughter and, while doing so, have fun with those around them. Laughing also is also closely linked to happiness, and being happy is, of course, priceless.

In one study, when babies were shown a toy duck that was then thrown to the ground, only the babies who giggled copied the action when they were given the toy. Clearly those babies understood the significance of the action and ‘got’ the joke!

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:

Laughing helps children to develop better self-esteem;
It can help them to think a little bit differently and in a more creative way;
In so doing, it can also help improve their problem-solving skills as they ‘may look below the surface’ more often;
Laughing with friends, carers and parents helps closer bonds to develop;
It can be used to cheer other children up when they are upset and thereby improve social skills and empathy;
Laughing in the face of adversity can help boost future resilience, while also reducing anxiety;
It helps them to be more spontaneous, more playful and also not take things, including themselves, too seriously.

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

27 October 2020/in Early years, Food, Free stuff, Funding, Health, Healthy eating, Milk, Nursery, Parents, Streatham, Under-5s, Vitamins /by Mark

Are you pregnant, or a parent with a child under four? If so, your family may be eligible for free healthy food, milk and vitamin supplements. In England, some of these free items are available under the ‘Healthy Start’ scheme, which we’ll explain in this quick-start guide.

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.

LATEST UPDATE: the NHS has also begun testing a new alternative where money is paid into your account instead of supplying vouchers. This beta test is running right now, on an invitation-only basis via a letter from the NHS. Hopefully it’ll be rolled out country-wide if successful. If so, it could cure the current issue whereby vouchers cannot be used to pay for food, vitamins and milk online. Clearly, that’s a significant issue in view of the pandemic and the move to shopping more online.

So, what free stuff can you get?

Eligible individuals can get the following, absolutely free:

Cow’s milk;
Infant formula milk;
Fruit;
Vegetables;
Pulses;
Free vitamin supplements for breastfeeding mums;
Free vitamin drops for young children (6 months to 4 years) …

The Importance of Sleep for Babies & Toddlers

14 October 2020/in Childcare, Early years, Early Years Education, Education, Health & Safety, Nurseries, Nursery, Parents, Pre-schools, Sleep for under-fives, Streatham, SW16, Under-5s /by Mark

We all know how detrimental a bad night’s sleep can can be to our general wellbeing. At the very least, it can make the following day a real struggle, perhaps make us feel irritable and certainly leave us underperforming. With this in mind, we thought we’d take a look at how sleep affects babies, toddlers and under-fives. It will be no surprise to hear that a good night’s sleep is even more important for the early years age group.

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:

be happier, have better moods and be more resilient;
have better attention spans;
be more alert;
have improved learning capacity and cognitive performance;
have better memory skills (e.g. improved vocabulary acquisition);
have improved development of motor skills;
have improved mental and physical health;
be less likely to be withdrawn, stressed or anxious;
have a reduced likelihood of developing high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and depression.
What’s more, children’s growth hormone is produced when the child is asleep. This is essential for healthy growth and function of the child’s body, particularly during early infancy.
Other hormone levels change when you sleep and this can help with anything from skin repair to muscle mass and even changes to body weight.

These are significant benefits, so high quality sleep — and the right amount — is incredibly important.

“A quarter of children under the age of 5 don’t get adequate sleep” (National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information)

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

4-12 months old: 12-16 hours of sleep (per 24 hours, including naps)
1-2 years old: 11-14 hours of sleep (per 24 hours, including naps)
3-5 years old: 10-13 hours of sleep (per 24 hours, including naps)

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.

17 September 2020/in Childcare, Early years, Early Years Education, Education, Free Childcare, Nurseries, Pre-schools, Streatham, Under-5s /by Mark

There are compelling reasons why under-fives should attend early years education and childcare settings like nurseries or pre-schools, or their equivalent — before starting school. Missing this crucial stage in their early years education and development may disadvantage the child — a fact that’s backed up by various studies.

Results of a Department for Education (DoE) 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)

Note: the term ‘Early Childhood Education & Care’ (ECEC for short) refers to non-parental childcare and early education that occurs before school. There are several different types, including nursery settings, pre-schools, registered childminders and so on, so the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) and the European Commission have adopted this term to encompass them all.

According to the DoE 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.

“Research … indicated that the benefits of high quality early education exist from as young as two years of age.” (Sammons et al., 2002)

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 DoE impact study shows that 2-year-olds benefit most if they …

Our Blog.

11 Super Sensory Activities for Under-Fives

Sensory Play Ideas for Babies

The Benefits of Sensory Play for Under-Fives

The Senses

What is Sensory Play?

The Benefits of Sensory Play

The Complete Guide to Choosing a Nursery

A Convenient Nursery Location

Social Proof

Nursery Jokes For Under-5s

Laughter for Little Ones – & Why it’s So Essential

Growing a Sense of Humour

The Benefits of Laughter for Little Ones

Medical benefits

FREE Food, Milk & Vitamins! A Guide to the Healthy Start Scheme

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?

How much sleep should young children and babies get?

Recommended sleep time

Sleep Hygiene

Your Toddler Needs to Go to Nursery. Here’s Why.

Benefits of attending Early Childhood Education & Care (ECEC)

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