After a grant last year from their local housing authority, Believe Housing Limited, to provide take-away teas for the children, the team at Witton Gilbert Nursery bought equipment, reusable containers, and ingredients to do take away teas over six Fridays. This year, the team has gone one step further and raised funds themselves for ingredients to do the same again! The children help choose recipes and then vote for their favourite six. This week, it was cheese and ham puffs.

The children are also developing their independence, social and self-help skills, and their physical development at weekly swimming lessons at the local pool. They travel via minibus to enjoy an hour of fun and games that help the children to gain both water confidence and danger awareness. The children all gained an 'I can...' swimming certificate at the end of autumn term and are now working towards their next milestone!

At Centre Place Nursery, the children have embraced British Science Week with lots of different and exciting learning opportunities! Children were supervised while carrying out experiments themselves - a great way to develop their problem-solving skills, as well as their independence and sense of achievement.

One experiment was with paint dabbers on cotton wool pads, which were then placed into a tray of milk while the children watched the patterns develop, grow and change, prompting lots of exciting language: swirly, squiggly, rainbow, moving, mixing, patterns.

The children then experimented with pipettes and water trays to transfer liquids into an ice tray, which made use of their hand-eye co-ordination skills and formed part of their fine motor skills development.

The children have also been planting seeds and exploring how things grow. Each child planted cress seeds and then made sure to water and look after them, teaching them to care about and respect their environment. This will lead them on to understanding how people must look after each other and take care of things around us, including ourselves.

Every day brings so much joy not only to the children but the staff, too, and it's a real pleasure to watch them grown and learn!

The staff and children at William Older Playgroup, Angmering, took a hearty bite into their Book Week recently, being visited by their favourite author and illustrator, Nick Sharratt - creator of Shark in the Park, The Foggy Foggy Forest and the You Choose series of books. The children were so excited, making a fantastic Shark in the Park wall display which Nick loved!

The afternoon started off with Nick reading his stories to the children followed by a drawing workshop, showing them simple ways to draw some of the animals in his books.

After cutting the ribbons on two of their fantastic new play areas, declaring them officially open for fun, he also asked to have his picture taken in their Ice Cream Van as he had never seen anything like it before and it reminded him of the one in his book, The Foggy Foggy Forest.

The staff then surprised the children with some fantastic Shark in the Park cakes, with Nick and his assistant managing two each! Nick kindly stayed on for photos and book signings at the end of the day. What a snappy start to Book Week at William Older Playgroup!

What have you been up to?
Under 5 wants to know! To share your own stories, please email editor.u5@eyalliance.org.uk with the subject line ‘My Under 5’.