Hotwells Children’s House

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Hotwells Children’s House

Montessori - Early Years Education - Inclusion - Relationship based - Independent - Community

17/10/2025

🚀 Going into space in a sellotape shuttle 🚀
This week we have been learning about Mae Jemison, the first Black woman to become an astronaut and travel into space. As part of this we have been making the Space Shuttle Endeavour out of a very large cardboard box. These two children had a wonderful time covering the entire roof in layers of sellotape, taking turns to cut pieces for one another and stick them on. There is so much learning happening, we can see collaboration, communication, fine motor development and much more! They showed very high levels of wellbeing and involvement throughout their self-chosen task!

09/10/2025

🎈Beautifully inspiring Bristol balloons 🎈We love our city; especially on sunny Autumnal mornings when the balloons are flying high. 😍

08/10/2025

📚 The library is open! 📚
We have set up our little parent library in our new space. It’s nice to be able to offer parents a book to dip into if they ask for help or advice.
We have started it with some of our favourites - recommendations for more are very welcome, what should we add next?

17/09/2025

🌻 September 🌻
September is such a busy month! We and our team are feeling rather like we want to relax like this well looked after doll who we found in our role play corner. We have been building relationships with our new children and families, it’s big emotional work that sits alongside us all getting used to our lovely new classroom. It’s always so beautiful to see children being put in touch with our environment, and starting to experience the freedoms and responsibilities of our Montessori method.

17/08/2025

📝 We’re thinking about you! 📝
It’s that time of year again - writing and sending out postcards to our new and returning little people. A tiny but important part of how we build connection, showing that we are holding them in mind even when they’re not at Montessori.
The picture is of our new classroom, Sarah sketched it last year when we first signed our lease, and we had it made into a rubber stamp to make our own Hotwells Children’s House cards and postcards.

27/07/2025

🚚📦 Moving Time 📦🚚
We have just come to the end of three long, busy days of work. We haven’t had a moment to stop and think about the end of our wonderful first year at Hotwells Children’s House - time for reflection will come next week. We’ve dived straight into our final move and have been very excitedly setting up shop in our long-awaited permanent location at , now all freshly painted and ready for us. We took the opportunity to have a good sort out, get our woodwork resources out of storage and to build some IKEA furniture, Montessori style! As often happens, we ended up accidentally twinning in double dungarees.
Now it’s time for a well deserved rest we think 😴

08/07/2025

🍓 June 🍓
We are all feeling amazed that we have nearly come to the end of our first full year as Hotwells Children’s House. What a joy it has been to spend the Summer months with these little people!
June was full of sunshine and play outside as well as starting to think about transitions, both for children leaving our nursery and for new children starting in September. We’ve been hosting stay and plays, writing transfer records, and gently supporting children to think about starting at school. For us next year will be a big change as many of our leavers will go to - meaning we will still get to see them every day! At our old setting we sent children to a huge range of primary schools, so this will be a new experience for us!

03/07/2025

📣 Calling all Bristol Early Years Practitioners 📣

Bristol Early Years Anti-Racist Practice Forum
Easton Community Children’s Centre
Tuesday 8th July 5.30-7.30

It’s our last forum session of the year - and what a session it will be. The focus is on policy, with lots of time for reflection and chat.
Everyone who attends will get:
- Free BAND anti-racism policy template
- Free staffroom poster ‘… but what do I say?’
- The opportunity to borrow books from our new, free lending library, take away a children’s book for your setting and a book for your staffroom so that you can put this work into practice straight away.

Please share far and wide!
Love,
Erin, Izzy, Beth and Shaddai

26/06/2025

🌈 Celebrating Pride 🌈
Here are a selection of the books we have had out this month to introduce children to Pride.
Our brains start to notice difference in babyhood, so we believe we have a unique window of time in early childhood to normalise and celebrate protected characteristics. Making these really visible in our environment means that children see that families can look lots of different ways - and our team support this through conversation. We might say “some children have a mummy and a daddy, some children have two mummies, some children have two daddies” - we use age and stage appropriate language, normalising all family set-ups. Our goal is for our nursery to feel like a safe space for everyone. All are welcome here.

24/06/2025

✨ Come and join our team ✨
Due to expansion when we move into our final classroom we are looking for one more Montessori or Early Years Practitioner to join our team.
We can offer a truly child led approach to early childhood education, working as part of a close knit and supportive team, to better than statutory ratios. Get in touch to find out more.
The role is 8.00/8.30 - 16.00/16.30 (to be discussed), Monday to Thursday. We are a term time only setting and are based in Hotwells, Bristol.

14/06/2025

🫧🧽🪛🔧 FOSTERING INDEPENDENCE 🔧🪛🧽🫧 At Hotwells Children’s House we are followers of Maria Montessori’s quote ‘help me to do it myself’. We put great care into preparing our environment so that we can help children learn how to do things for themselves. We do this in lots of different ways. One example is through our ‘Activities of Everyday Living’, where children learn skills such as buttoning, zipping and tying laces; using different tools such as tweezers, tongs and pipettes; and, practical skills such as pegging clothes, bathing a baby doll and polishing toy cars. We teach children how to serve themselves snacks, pour themselves and their friends a drink and how to wash up afterwards. By providing a child-sized environment and the right tools alongside a supportive community and the space and time that they need to practise, we provide children with everything they need on their journey to become independent young people. Our trust in them and their experience of doing things for themselves builds their confidence and self-esteem.

04/06/2025

🎨 The Holly Room 🎨
At our last setting, the room with all our art materials was called the Holly room, and it’s a name we can’t seem to let go of! Our reimagined ‘Holly’ space is full of open ended, high quality resources - allowing children to create, explore and relax.
This week a big collaborative piece has been popular, we gave the children the challenge of covering up all the blank space, and they’re definitely getting closer as the days go on!
We have also enjoyed lots of sensory exploration of paint and clay. Swipe through to see some high focus clay and water mixing!

Address

Clifton

Website

http://www.hotwellschildrenshouse.co.uk/

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