Wood’s Childcare

28/03/2026

🌸🐣 Final Week of Spring Term 🐣🌸

What a lovely way to finish our spring term! This week the acorns have been busy enjoying lots of seasonal fun and hands-on learning.

We enjoyed an exciting Easter egg hunt in the garden, where everyone had great fun searching high and low and celebrating their discoveries. The acorns also completed their beautiful Easter egg cards, using wax resist crayon and painting over the top with watercolours – they were fascinated watching their designs appear like magic! 🎨✨

We enjoyed a visit to the farm to see the rabbits and chickens, which was a big hit with everyone. On our various walks, we’ve been spotting all the lovely signs of spring, chatting about what we can see and hear around us. 🌼🌱

Sensory play has been very popular this week, with lots of pouring, scooping and immersing in coloured rice. The acorns always enjoy exploring different textures and developing their coordination through play. We also used spring-themed cookie cutters with playdough, helping to strengthen those important fine motor muscles in little hands. 👐

It’s been a wonderful week full of creativity, exploration and seasonal fun. Wishing all our families a happy and relaxing break! 🐰💛

20/03/2026

🐦‍⬛🦆🪺 A glorious week of weather for a spot of bird watching!

The acorns got creative making their own bird nests using sticks, carefully building and designing their own little homes just like real birds. They also had lots of fun making bird feeders using pine cones, peanut butter and bird seed – a fantastic hands-on activity that everyone really enjoyed! We then hung the feeders in the garden and used binoculars to spot and identify the different birds that came to visit.

We took our learning further with a trip to Tiddenfoot Lake, where the acorns enjoyed feeding the ducks and continuing their bird watching in a new environment. Another highlight of the week was our visit to Rushmere. The acorns were fascinated watching live footage of baby herons in their nest, and we even had a go at building our own nests in the woods!

Not forgetting St Patrick’s Day ☘️ Our littlest acorn came dressed for the occasion and looked ever so cute in his shamrock outfit ready for some play in a very green tuff tray!

I can’t believe next week is the last week of the Spring term. Have a lovely weekend all!

13/03/2026

Mother’s Day celebrations 🌸

13/03/2026

A lovely week celebrating the wonderful mummies, mamas, mammies, mummas and other females in our lives 🥰
The acorns loved serving floral afternoon tea, both inside and outside. They arranged some beautiful bouquets of flowers and went on a little daisy scavenger hunt round the field; threading the stalks through the little holes on our wooden display.
Bracelets were hung carefully on the mug tree or taken off and worn around the playroom.
The baby dolls were well taken care of. The older acorns practiced putting nappies on their dolls and wrapping them up snuggly in blankets. The mother animals were matched up to their babies (and chewed 😂).
I hope you all have a lovely weekend and that all the mummies have a wonderful Mother’s Day!!

06/03/2026

So many wonderful photos of our book week activities! I couldn’t choose - so you got them all 🤣

We read the story ‘Elmer’ by David McKee. There are so many fantastic themes to explore in this book such as shape, colour, weather, differences and jungle animals. The acorns enjoyed constructing using wooden block cubes and magnetic tiles, thinking carefully about how to connect them or balance them on top of each other.

A blissful morning was had at our local library. The acorns chose books that caught their eye which we enjoyed reading together. Cats seemed to be a firm favourite theme 🐈 which got me thinking of compiling a list of the most requested books at Wood’s Childcare. The acorns always have access to a wide variety of books and each time a new one is introduced it is added to the bookshelf. It’s so interesting which ones stand the test of time and are brought to me to read more frequently than others.

Wood’s Childcare top reads:
1. Fox’s Socks - Julia Donaldson
2. Brrr! Brrr! - Sebastien Braun
3. Noisy Things That Go
4. Whoosh! Walter’s Wonderful Web - Tim Hopgood
5. Making Faces
6. Busy Ambulance
7. Dig Dig Digging - Margaret Mayo
8. Ten Little Dinosaurs - Mike Brownlow

🐘 A misty morning was had at Whipsnade Zoo visiting the Asian Elephants so that we could meet Elmer’s real life friends! They were inside having breakfast when we arrived so the acorns got a really close look (and smell 🤣) of these incredible animals.

The garden improvements are finally complete! The acorns have a great patio space to play on (before and after pics to follow 😍). I’m so excited to add to the space over time, but simply being able to open the playroom doors and move freely between inside and outside under the beautiful sunshine this week was so satisfying. The acorns found pieces of Elmer’s patchwork (cut up sponges) to transfer water. This really worked little hand muscles as they learnt to dip and squeeze in order to move the water from the tray into the containers. This kept them engaged for such a long time, as did the coloured ball transfer activity on the tuff tray - the simple ones are always the best 😉

On world book day itself, I was greeted at the door by Little Bear (from Goldilocks and the Three Bears), Zog and Elmer the elephant himself made an appearance! The acorns looked adorable. Have a lovely weekend all!

27/02/2026

Teeth and eating this week 🦷🪥 The acorns enjoyed brushing the marks off the sets of teeth - they were very thorough about it too! The newly qualified dentists then checked the teeth of all the other toys in the room, giving them a good clean! We read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, pointing out the foods in the book and posting them into the caterpillar’s mouth. Fine motor skills were developed whilst threading the caterpillars through the holes in different pieces of fruit.

We visited the supermarket to pick out some fruits for snack time and soaked up the first taste of Spring with the beautiful weather we had midweek! Have a lovely weekend all!

13/02/2026

Valentines and birthday fun to end the half term! We celebrated one of the acorns 1st birthdays this week! Balloons, cake and a trip to the Softplay before sensory play with coloured rice.

Many of the acorns enjoy moving objects from one place to another, including tipping toys from one container to another so this activity helped them to continue exploring the transporting schema by pouring the rice into the different containers provided and then around the room into whatever they could find 😂 They did do a great job at helping to sweep up the stray rice afterwards!

Our youngest acorns enjoyed exploring the sensory basket whilst the older ones created their own valentines cupcakes using loose parts such as petals and pom poms. We ended the week with valentines playdough which got squished and squashed into cupcakes and cut up with wooden knives and spoons from our kitchen area.

Something very exciting is happening in the Wood’s Childcare garden 😍 The acorns loved watching the digger in action until rain halted proceedings. Watch this space!

6 weeks have flown by. Have a lovely weekend all! Sending valentines love your way ❤️

06/02/2026

Vehicles! ✈️🚜🚗🛳️🚂 One of the acorns’ all round favourites so we had so much fun engaging in all the activities this week. The train track comes out every day without fail. The acorns love connecting the different parts of the track and pushing the trains over bridges and into tunnels. We balanced cars on our tuff tray roads and rolled vehicles down ramps. I’ve recently bought a new bed and these wooden bed frame slats from my old one made great ramps! The acorns worked out if we move them together we can make a giant ramp for the larger vehicles and one of the acorns experimented with what happens to the vehicles if the ramp is covered with her special blanket - which they all found highly amusing! The weather hasn’t been wonderful, but we managed to get out and play with the toy boats and submarines and enjoy a trip to the train station and wave to the passengers! We really enjoyed painting with cars and washing the cars afterwards in soapy water. My recent purchase of a giant transporter truck went down a treat - I’d seen on other childcare pages and also from talking to other childminders that have this toy that it is very well played with and they were right! It might be huge 🥴 but it has been well loved here already! Have a lovely weekend all!

30/01/2026

Our activities this week were inspired by the book ‘The Colour Monster’. Language was explored around different colours, but also different feelings - particularly happy and sad. The acorns dived right into the spaghetti messy play at the beginning of the week! The spaghetti started on the tray, but eventually made its way into pots and pans in our play kitchen. It was stretched and mixed, pulled and pushed into different containers. The acorns loved reading the book and fetching the correct colour monster as we reached each different feeling to hold. They made happy and sad faces using loose parts both inside and outside. We discussed how many eyes we have and counted them on ourselves, the teddies and the dolls even though we enjoyed adding multiple eyes to the craft creations 🤣 The acorns looked at their faces in the mirror and they enjoyed pulling silly faces or watching me pull some! Such a colourful week with endless opportunities to extend learning as the children played with different coloured toys around the room - sorting, stacking, squishing, connecting! Have a lovely weekend all!

24/01/2026

People who help us! 🚒🚓🚑 Particularly the emergency services this week! It was so much fun role playing firefighters and doctors. I’ve had my blood pressure checked, my heart monitored, a number of injections and lots of medicine so it’s safe to say I’ve been well looked after 🤣. The acorns were very brave putting out a rather large fire on the tuff tray in the garden and I managed to receive an extra shower in the process 🚿! We took a walk through town to see what emergency service vehicles we could spot and passed the fire station on the way to the park where our older acorns worked on their gross motor skills climbing ladders up to the slides just like the firefighters. They were reaching new heights climbing at the soft play too- wonderful to see their confidence increasing! Another busy week! Hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend!

16/01/2026

Polar animals this week! 🐻‍❄️🐧 The acorns loved exploring the small world sensory trays using ice and white jelly cubes for icebergs. Their favourite part was pushing the penguins off the side of the tray and watching them splash into the water. We visited the penguins at Whipsnade Zoo and enjoyed waddling like penguins whilst singing ‘Have you Ever Seen a Penguin Come to Tea?’ 🎶 The older acorns enjoyed a spot of ‘ice fishing’ using the magnetic fishing game and a painted cardboard box with a hole cut in it. They always choose to get this game out when playing so it was nice to play it with a polar twist and the extra challenge of trying to catch the fish through the hole. Finger painting was used to create a cute penguin craft and the acorns explored the tracks the different animals make when pressed into playdough. Lots of fun was had at the farm Softplay on a particularly rainy morning! Have a lovely weekend all!

09/01/2026