Bill&Belle Daycare - Ofsted Registered Childminder

A very exciting delivery at Bill&Belle Daycare today.. a mud kitchen for our garden ❤️

I’ve been quiet on my page recently but very busy behind the scenes saying goodbye to some of our lovely children as they leave for new adventures at school, and hello to new children who are just starting their journey here.

Our playroom is looking lovely and autumnal at the moment 🍁 🍃 🍂 so I will be doing an update soon!

When the delivery person knocked on the door today I was a bit confused as I’d forgotten I’d ordered this 🤦‍♀️ 😆 but I’m so glad I did!

I love these 3 ‘barns’ as they are so universal. Rather than being a particular ‘thing’ they can be anything.

They can be a house for our dolls, a farm, a fire station, a car garage, we can use it for the dinosaurs, our wildlife animals, the list goes on!

I’m very excited to see what my little ones do with these next week.

I’ve also added a picture of the box, which my little ones have spent all afternoon playing with! You can’t beat a good sized box!

On Tuesday this week we attended a sensory play session with the children. We really enjoyed it and it gave me lots of new ideas for sensory play. There are a few other sessions on so if any local childminders haven’t seen, here it is!

People always comment on how tidy my playroom is and it is… in the morning, and in the evening. During the day everything is well played with, so as something a bit different I took a few pics of the playroom in various stages of play today!

It definitely isn’t always tidy 😆 but the children are fabulous at helping me put things away at the end of the day ❤️

Today while I was setting up a different afternoon activity, my children were having a look though one of the boxes I’d gotten out, and found these astronauts!

I had completely forgotten I bought these, and they wanted to play with them… so I created the quickest tough tray ever!

Oats left over from flapjacks, some glitter, some ‘moon rocks’ and our astronauts and rockets and the children loved it!

We also watched a child friendly version of the moon landing, and I printed off some pictures of the surface of the moon for them to look at, which we added to the tuff tray. 🌒 🧑‍🚀

It wasn’t what I had planned for this afternoon but it was a lovely activity and sometimes you just need to change tack and go with the flow!

Lovely activity today 🕷️ 🪰 🐜 🐝 🐛
The children really enjoyed using the tweezers to rescue the insects, being careful to avoid the spiders web!

We compared the bugs we rescued to the bugs in our book and found out a little about them. We used magnifiers to look at the minibeasts and placed them safely in the grass in the second tuff tray.

We read all about spiders and how and why they make webs. 🕷️

Sunday set up! All ready for my little ones tomorrow 🕷️

The children are all very interested in minibeasts at the moment so I’ve been incorporating that into our tuff trays recently.

Tomorrow we will be rescuing the insects that are caught in the spiders web, using our tweezers to help with our fine motor control. We are going to use our magnifying glasses to look at the insects close up. We can count their legs, look at their differences etc.

We also have our bug house book all about minibeats, which we will be reading to find out some interesting facts about minibeasts!

Dandelion playdough!

I saw this recipie on a page I follow and had to try it out. This was a lovely whole day activity, from picking the dandelions with the children in the morning, to making the playdough, to playing with it in the afternoon. And it was a perfect dough to try out our new garden bugs rollers!

The children really loved this activity, and I’m really impressed at how the playdough turned out, it’s a lovely texture and smell. And the dandelions naturally colour the playdough a lovely pale colour.

We added some thyme from the garden to our play, and the children enjoyed adding it to the dough and seeing how it changed the texture, colour and smell.

The children enjoyed using our new rollers, stamping the bug and the accompanying pattern into their playdough. We added our wooden pattern stampers and wooden textured rolling pins too.

The children also enjoyed using the magnifying glasses to have a lose up look at the flecks of dandelion petals in their playdough, and the patterns they were making.

I love buying resources to help develop the children’s interests so here is a snapshot of a few new ones we have bought recently.

- 5 little speckled frog song sack. The frogs are so cute! We have had a lot of love for this today already so I think this is going to become a favourite!
- Bee counters and wood slices. I’m going to write numbers on the wood slices for a counting activity
- Garden bugs rollers, these are really well made (I love Yellow Door resources) and will be great with the playdough
- Felt trees and matching fruits. These will be great for helping with counting and in the small world play
- Nuts and bolts. Again, great for colour matching, hand eye coordination and fine motor skills - excising those hand muscles in play!
- wooden tools and foam bricks (box of 25). My children love these at one of the toddler groups we go to, so they have been on my list for a while. I want to get some hard hats and hi vis vests to go with these to encourage role play
- Mushroom house, and bendy path, because all my little ones love small world play. We also got some flexible roads which aren’t pictured
- a couple of extra mini beasts (ant and cricket) to add to our collection
- river stone stepping stones for in or out door play. Great for balancing and helping with large motor control
- rainbow pebbles. These have already been used in our small world play as paths, water, grass, and to create patterns, enclosures and shapes, really open ended so great to add to lots of activities.
- boxes still to open! We have water channels and stands, and an outdoor tuff tray stand in these for garden play.

We have made flapjacks a few times (with mixed results!), but this recipie worked really well.

We used raisins, chocolate chips, jumbo rolled oats, butter, syrup, golden sugar and a bit of flour to bind.

The children enjoyed helping me weigh out the ingredients on our scales. Then I carefully melted the butter, sugar and syrup as the children mixed the dry ingredients together.

Finally we combined all the ingredients, popped them in the oven and enjoyed them for snack once they had cooled 😋

A lovely morning activity ❤️

We have had a lovely day today, visiting Cheeky Monkey’s in the morning, and baking a tasty cake in the afternoon.

We had a rainbow mad little one here today, so decided to make a marble rainbow cake… I think it turned out great!

The children enjoyed having some for snack 😋

I’m now closed until Thursday, do I hope all my families have a fantastic Easter 🐣 and see you all soon! ❤️

Today the children made their own pizza. Didn’t they do a great job! We made our own pizza sauce from chopped tomatoes, olive oil and fresh basil.

The children picked their toppings (they went for cheese, sweetcorn and there is a little bit of onion and ham dotted in various places!), they were placed on the pizza and it went in the oven for 20 mins.

The children really enjoyed weighing and measuring, deciding what would go on the pizza, working together, organising the toppings and of course eating it!

They were really proud of the finished product and ate it for lunch with cucumber, carrots and baked beans 😋

We are making the most of our half term this week! Today myself, my mindees and Annabelle went to the cinema to watch Migration as a half term treat. We had a lovely time, the little ones were amazing and really enjoyed the film ❤️

Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, so we made some lovely pancakes at Bill&Belle Daycare 😋

The children have been enjoying our pancake role play area over the past 2 weeks, so they already knew exactly what we needed ‘Hannah! Get the eggs! We need milk too!’

The children enjoyed weighing and measuring, mixing, and then eating the pancakes 😋

We had the traditional lemon and sugar toppings as well as fruit, syrup, honey, and chocolate sauce to choose from.

We also enjoyed reading ‘Mama Panyas Pancakes’ and ‘Mr Wolf’s Pancakes’

We have had a lovely, busy, first day of half term. Today we went on a bus, and then on the tram, to get into Manchester centre to go and see the Chinese lanterns.

We have been learning about Chinese New Year over the past few weeks. We have read our books about Chinese New Year, learning about the traditions. We have watched some videos of the fireworks and Dragon Dances, and today we went to see the lanterns.

The children also took home red envelopes with (chocolate) money in them this evening which represent good wishes for the year ahead.

We then went to central library, where we visited the children’s library, and listened to a story. The children really enjoyed the glass lift too!

Finally, we went to McDonalds for lunch, before getting the tram home. A fantastic adventure!

I’ve been busy packing away our winter themed toys, and bringing out some new resources for a bit of a change.

We have lots to celebrate in February such as Chinese New Year, Valentines Day and Pancake Day! So I’ve switched the playroom around to reflect these.

The children have enjoyed playing in our role play Chinese restaurant today! We have also been reading ‘Larnterns and Firecrackers’ to find out all about Chinese New Year.

Yesterday was party day and we had a very lovely time with our friends from Helen’s house. We played party games, danced, and had a lovely party lunch!

Today was Christmas Dinner Day! The children really enjoyed their dinner (chicken, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puds, veg, sausage, stuffing & gravy) and loved pulling Christmas crackers with their friends!

I’ve been busy making some very quick Christmas mini cupcakes this evening as tomorrow we have our friends from Helen’s childminding joining us for our Christmas party!

We had a lovely time at our regualar toddler group today for our final time of 2023, tomorrow is party day, and Thursday is Christmas dinner day!

A lovely, festive last week before the Christmas break 🎅 🎄

It’s been a snowy week in the run up to Christmas this week. Maybe not outside… but in the playroom at least! The children have loved playing with snow in our activities this week.

We have talked about how it feels (soft, cold, a bit like sand), we have played with it with the Arctic animals, we have talked about what kind of animals live in cold climates. We have read our book about penguins.

We have scooped, sprinkled, patted, put it in containers, and we have used our fingers to draw lines, circles and patterns in the snow.

It’s been a lovely snowy week! ❄️

We had a lovely time at St Martins Church today for the tree festival. The children really enjoyed looking at all the beautiful trees and picking their favourite ones… they were all amazing so it was hard to pick out favourites!

They also enjoyed a little craft activity and a biscuit! The children always enjoy getting involved in the community and I would reccomend popping in to the the tree festival this weekend if you are local 🎄

Today we revisited a lovely Christmas activity we did a couple of years ago. The children used the small pom poms to finish the string of lights drawn on the table. A great little activity to help develop those hand and finger muscles.

We talked about the colours we were using, and spacing them out ‘let’s do green next!’. There was lots of concentration getting the pom poms on the line, and of course lots of fine motor skills involved! The children did a great job and their finished lights looked great!

We had a very special visitor at Bill&Belle Daycare on Wednesday! The children were fascinated watching Cara paint our windows for Christmas, shouting ‘Hannah! It’s going cold in your playroom! I can see snowflakes!’

We are definitely ready for Christmas now ❤️ 🎄 ⛄️ ❄️