A tuff tray activity is creating objects of interest at a children’s height so they can freely access different resources set up in a way that is really appealing and engaging for the children.

Across all our six nurseries the children love to be involved in making tuff tray activities and they always come from a child’s interest; that may have been something they have been doing at home or a previous activity at nursery. here are a few examples of lovely tuff tray ideas that you might like to replicate at home. Local garden centres sell mini versions of these trays that you would buy for planting seeds etc.

The 17th of October marked the National Nursery Practitioner Day.

We appreciate the amazing job all our nursery practitioners do throughout the year but we wanted to mark this day by doing something a little different to normal. Each of our nurseries celebrated it in different ways from providing lovely breakfast goodies in their staff room, or creating little thank you jam jars for each staff member full of little notes and thoughtful presents to ordering bacon sandwiches for their team. We made each nursery manager a special goody bag at our latest managers meeting to say thank you for their hard work too.

Cliffe House has a very strong family ethos and we wouldn’t be able to provide the fantastic experiences for all our fab children without the amazing staff teams we have.

Across all our six nurseries the children have been really embracing Autumn and the activities they have been doing are wonderful to see!

The use of loose parts can be seen throughout the activities and the children have loved going on scavenger hunts outside at nursery as well as at home with their families to find lots of natural objects they can use to create amazing pieces of artwork as well as using them during open ended play.

This week is recycling week and at our Baildon nursery we have joined in with a local community initiative and Hovis to offer a bread bag recycling scheme.

Our recycling box for this is located in the nursery hallway and all our parents, staff and children have already been posting bread bags in it. Recycling with children from a young age really helps to make them more aware of looking after our environment and will help to make recycling second nature to them as they grow and thrive.

Autumn is here!!

All our nurseries love this time of year as they can go on Autumn scavenger hunts, see the ever changing outdoor environment and create amazing artwork and activities from the natural objects they have found. The Autumn hunt bags are available for you to take home anytime and we love to see the exciting things you have found.

We have been looking at different ways we can reduce the number of single use plastics we use across all our Cliffe House settings.

We have firstly reduced the number of plastic resources we have for the children and are embracing a more natural, loose parts approach to our resources. The next big impact we have made to be more environmentally conscious is to stop the use of disposable plastic aprons.

We have six settings with a huge amount of nappy changes each day, changing to PVC, wipeable aprons has been a massive environmental achievement for us and here are a few images of our lovely staff teams wearing the new aprons!

We have got more green initiatives we are going to introduce in the next few months so watch this space!

At Cliffe House we have our own inhouse training academy. This not only allows staff to gain NVQ qualifications in childcare whilst they work but it also allows our current staff to continue in their own professional development and gain new qualifications relevant to their role.

This week our staff have been doing some Outdoor maths training. Learning in the outdoors is a fundamental part of early childhood education and can help to develop children in so may different ways as the learning opportunities to them are endless.

Here are a few photos of the training they undertook and shows how things that everyone can find in the outdoors everyday, can be used as a maths activity tool.

Visit our Facebook pages and Instagram page to see even more clips of what the children get up to in the outdoors!

Across all our nurseries we have a ‘Book of the Month’ and this month it has been ‘We’re going on a Bear Hunt’. The children and staff have all been doing some fantastic activities so far and it is so lovely to see how a story can be told in so many different ways!

The Book of the Month is always inline with a significant festival or celebration happening that month to broaden children’s experiences and knowledge of understanding the world and communities around them.

Next months books are ‘What the Ladybird Heard’ for the Yellow and Red rooms and ‘Cave Baby’ for our Blue and Green rooms. These books have been chosen as they are not only fantastic books and have great rhythm and excitement in them but they are also Julia Donaldson books and in September it is her birthday so we wanted to celebrate a great authors birthday with sharing her fantastic tales at nursery!

On Monday we had a brilliant team night painting story stones.

Our nursery nurses from across our different settings all came together at our Horsforth Featherbank nursery and enjoyed creating lots of different sets of story stones.

Here are a few of the lovely sets the staff made and they are all really excited for using them at story time with the children to make the stories even more exciting and ever changing.

We are a member of daynurseries.co.uk which is an online platform for  Nurseries to provide information for new parents searching for Good or Outstanding childcare providers but it also allows parents and carers of our nursery children to provide reviews of the nursery their children attend.

We are very proud of the lovely reviews we have received from our wonderful families and the reviews are a credit to our Cliffe House teams. As a nursery group our current score is 9.3 out of 10 which is wonderful!!

If you are a nursery parent and would like to submit a review, please visit the Day Nurseries website below.

www.daynurseries.co.uk

Cliffe House Overall Score Certificate    Shipley Score Certificate    Featherbank Score Certificate     Burley Score Certificate    Bramhope Score Certificate    Baildon Score Certificate    Trinity Score Certificate