Hello from the Riverside Day Nursery

Dear Parents,

We hope that you are well and that you are enjoying the Spring sunshine that is starting to shine through? We are making the most of the warmer days with the children by feeding the local ducks and swans and spending time in our soon-to-be revamped nursery garden.                                           

As you may have seen from our announcement, we are thrilled that work will start on 4th May to transform our tired nursery garden into a dream play space.

The new garden promises to be an amazing, interactive place where the children can play, test out new skills – like climbing, balancing and den making – and importantly, have lots and lots of fun!

Alongside a spacious Gazebo, there will be lots of new play equipment, including a large Water Wall, Mud Kitchen – with its own dedicated Mud Box for some seriously messy play – and outdoor musical instruments to compose tunes on.

Construction will take around three weeks, with the garden expected to be completed by the end of May, just in time for the summer months!

While the garden is being built, we will use the other outside areas available to us at the leisure centre. 

We’re sure you’ll agree that our new garden is an exciting transformation which will enrich our nursery environment. We will provide you with photos of the work as it progresses. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the development, please do get in touch.

In other news, the children have been celebrating lots of world and national events recently. The children wore fabulous costumes from their favourite stories for World Book Day – you can see photos below – and made imaginative crafts for St Patrick’s Day and St David’s Day.

Wishing you all a wonderful April!    

The Riverside Day Nursery Team  

Coming soon! The plan for our fabulous new nursery garden.

 

Our Nursery Garden Makeover

Our garden received a thorough makeover this summer. The children are making the most of the exciting new facilities which include an upgraded mud kitchen – complete with lots of pots, pans and plates for cooking up muddy delicacies – a musical instrument wall, and a new look den with camouflaging.

Our new mud kitchen is proving a real hit

There is also a new vegetable patch and garden area for growing flowers and vegetables.  

Emma Summersgill, owner of the Riverside Day Nursery, says: “It’s lovely to see the children enjoying the new equipment. The biggest hit so far is definitely the mud kitchen, who knew we had so many budding natural chefs?!”

Playing on our new open-air music wall

The Garden is Coming!

As soon as the weather improves (fingers crossed!) we will back to using our very own nursery garden.

We have a access to a lovely garden where the children can enjoy playing, planting, and generally having fun. Once the weather warms up we’ll start weekly garden activities.

Team member, Amber, is also doing her Forest School training. Once complete, she can put her naturalist skills into action with an exciting range of bushscraft and outdoor activities for the children.

Rumour has it a mud kitchen is going to be installed as well…watch this space!

Garden Group

With the weather warming up we’ve been busy bees in the nursery garden.

Every Monday, two groups of children (of all ages and sizes!) spend quality time in our nursery garden.

Under the careful guidance of our maintenance manager and all-round Superstar, Warren, the children are able to try out a range of green-fingered activities.

[pb_blockquote] So far, they’ve sown lots of vegetable and wildflower seeds into trays, which hopefully will start to sprout soon. They’ve also planted an apple tree and some sweet-smelling honeysuckle plants.[/pb_blockquote]

We can already see the fruits of the children’s hard work from last year – a big sunny patch of yellow daffodils!

It’s great that the children are able to get out into the garden more – let’s hope the warmer weather continues.

Sowing our seeds

Sowing our seeds

Planting in the nursery garden

Adding the compost