Our Baby Rooms

Where it all begins...

For most of our parents, this will be the first time away from their little ones. It is our aim across both of our baby rooms to ensure this experience is as smooth as possible.

Our cosy, creative and nurturing baby rooms, The Hedgehog Room and The Butterflies room will work closely with parents or carers to welcome them into our community and to adapt to home schedules, easing them in with sessions.

Our Reggio Emilia ethos is evident through out our whole nursery, and just like the other rooms our babies are indeed the centre of their own learning. When creating our baby room’s our aim was to create a nurturing adaptable environment to support their growth and learning and each stage of development.

The space, the resources and the staff are all there to create a home away from home, a fun, creative, musical space to stimulate them as they navigate through their first year.

Loose parts display them selves a little differently here, we have safe larger loose parts such as wheels, tubes, large pine cones, cable reels. The room layout and resources change from week to week to mirror the children’s interests.

We will go into the key person and settling in process in more detail in our next blog, but for now, let us introduce you to our two baby rooms.

The Hedgehog Room

Lead by Tara, with Sophie as deputy, the Hedgehog room is sectioned into 2 parts. Part one has a large floor space where materials and art supplies are brought in daily for messy play and creativity. From hand painting, to gloop, to sand, ice, bubbles, cardboard boxes, no two days are the same when it comes to the resources in this area.

There is a loose part area, a small world area, pots and pans, puppets and a large round table for meal times accompanied by high chairs.

Part two is a carpeted movement area with mirrors, projectors, cushions and a large climbing frame, bridge and slide, where the children sleep.

The Butterflies Room

Lead by Becki, our second baby room is joined to the Hedgehogs Room via the shared nappy room that has recently been painted with an under the sea theme by our Atelierista. Like The Hedgehogs room, The Butterflies room as the area for creativity and a carpet area for movement and play, as well as constantly changing natural resources. There is also a darkened sensory room filled with lights and glowing artefacts.

Outdoor play is of equal importance to indoor play and the Baby rooms are no exception. Our outdoor spaces are an extension of their rooms, with opportunities to explore a mud kitchen, bikes and beds of lavender for additional sensory play. By having a big emphasis on outdoor play we help prepare the children for forest school and outdoor learning as they move up to the next rooms. This week the baby room went on a trip to the forest, where they noticed a new interest in mark making in the mud with sticks.

With a focus on nurturing your baby through those first months, our focus is on settling you and your baby, ensuring that you are both happy and well cared for. Close relationships are formed making the transition from home to nursery smooth with you feeling supported and your baby comforted and loved.

If you want to know more about our baby rooms or are interested in enrolling please get in touch https://inspirationsnurseries.co.uk/contact-us/

-Nathalie

by Inspirations

Ambiguous Resources 2

Have you ever made a car or a rocket from a cardboard box? We most definitely have. A saying we hear a lot is “they play with the box, more than the toys inside”. At Inspirations, we have also witnessed this, and observed that children gain a lot of skills from this type of play.

The children ‘making something out of nothing’ is teaching them to be resourceful and using their imaginations. I always remember the fairy liquid advert, the little boy waited weeks and weeks for the empty bottle so he could create a rocket with it. It doesn’t stop at just creating artwork. You can reuse many things to make for other uses which we will talk about a little later in this blog.

At Inspirations, we use loose parts (see our previous loose parts blog). The purpose of them, is that they are so versatile and allow the children to make whatever they wish.

A plastic car is only a plastic car, whereas a stick could be a magic wand or a person or wherever your imagination will take you. It is the same when reusing resources to make something else with the added bonus that we are recycling an item, instead of throwing it away.

We like to do this with a lot of items, including household items. For example old microwaves, iPads, toasters and typewriters in the home corner for the children to use during role play.  Using ‘real’ items ensures the children learn to respect things too. If a child drops or throws a plastic cup, there is no consequence that comes from that. Whereas, if they dropped a glass, it would smash and they could no longer play with it. In the art studio, they use glass pots that were dessert pots for paint. We use a lot of apple crates, wooden palettes, and cable reels for our equipment.

These are valuable pieces of equipment for us as well as excellent large loose parts for the children to use when being creative. The cable reels in the baby and toddler rooms have been decorated with different themes. One of them is a car theme with a road and ramps available to be put on the side where they choose. The other is a farm theme with Astro turf stuck on and a farmland scene painted on with a 3d effect. We also reuse tyres for large loose parts or even as planters or a sand pit! The babies have reused bicycle wheels to support the rotation schema- please see our ‘being two, what are schemas’ blog. We reuse bottles and create sensory bottles in the baby and toddler room. The preschoolers have reused bottles for planting.

This is just another valuable learning opportunity for the children to gain the skills to reuse things, rather than adding to the waste on Earth. We get a lot of our equipment from SCRAP (scrap creative reuse Arts Project Ltd) as we have spoken about in our ‘make something out of nothing’ blog. We also rely on the practitioners collecting and then our wonderful families donating things that they think we can reuse. Car boot sales and charity shops are a great find for getting things to reuse.

Next time you want to throw something away, perhaps think again, it might just be our children's next project waiting to happen.

-Kayleigh

by Inspirations

Into The Woods- Our Song

The children of Inspirations would like to share with you our very own Inspirations Original song written by Nathalie and the Pre-Schoolers. Every day upon entering the forest we greet 'Mr Owl' of Hunger Hill Woods, so we put this greeting to a tune on the ukulele. Please find the lyrics below if you want to sing along at home, if you woud like the chords just get in touch.

Into The Woods

Into the woods we go

To lose our mind our body and soul

As we leave our world behind

What Might we find?

Mr Owl I see you hurray!

Good afternoon may we enter today?

There's beauty here, we'd love to share

We tread lightly with care

We hear the wind through the trees and it whispers hello

We see the leaves change from brown onto green and yellow

Every's a new day in the forest we know

ooo ooo ooo ooo

Out of the woods we go

To lose our mind our body and soul

As we leave our world behind

What might we find?

Mr Owl I see you hurray!

Good afternoon may we leave today?

There's beauty here, we loved to share

We tread lightly with care

We hear the wind through the trees and it whispers hello

We see the leaves change from brown onto green and yellow

Every's a new day in the forest we know

ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo

by Inspirations