Do-Re-Mi Childminding

08/03/2025

All set up for Monday morning…new items have arrived for the setting! Books and small world items. Can’t wait for the children to have the chance to internet. 🚜✈️

06/03/2025

📚World Book Day 2025 📚 As the nation celebrates world book day today, we took some time to reflect on how we promote reading in our setting on a daily basis. Our children love sharing books. A particular favourite today was making pasta from playdough with our new pasta maker machine. The children used recipes from ‘The Gruffalos Recipe Book’ to inspire them. 🍝

02/03/2025

Our new setting has been open for a full week now and it is great to see it evolve to give the children the best circumstances for play. 🛝

02/03/2025

This weekend we have been busying addressing the ‘slushy’ garden. As a temporary measure, we have installed some Astro turf to address the hazard. We hope this allows the children to enjoy the outdoors more safely. If you know of anyone who is has more Astro turf available, please ask them to get in touch with us. 🏡

27/02/2025

26/02/2025

In our new setting, our famous art room has become a favourite with the children. They have loved the chance to explore paint and textures this week. It is to great to see their creativity come alive. 🎨

23/02/2025

This half term at Do-Re-Mi Childminding we have been exceptionally busy. As many of you know, we have moved house and so we have been busy preparing our new setting. We can’t wait to welcome children in on Monday to enjoy our new location, including our extra special art room! 🎨🖌️

08/02/2025

This week, we have been supporting the older children's ability to build in 3D. We used playdough to 'cement' our bricks together. We used the books ‘Stick Man’ and ‘Diggersaurus’ books for inspiration. For the younger children, we let them explore the textures and stuck wooden blocks in the playdough for them to pull off.

07/02/2025

🎂 Happy Birthday! 🎂 We always celebrate the children's birthdays with a birthday hat and their favourite activity. When the children are younger, they can't always tell us what activity they would like to do but we know the children well enough to listen through their play. This little one loves drawing. She is often trying to draw with the after school children who have the 'special pens'. So, we used the big piece of backing paper given to us by one of our teacher parents. We suprised her with the after school 'special pens' and let the children explore and play on a large surface.

06/02/2025

☕️ Hot chocolate station. ☕️ The children were role playing making hot chocolates inside so we took this outside into the rain. We used real coco powder for authentic smells. We had saucepans of warm 'milk' which was made from cornflour and water. We had corks to replicate marshmallows. The children were able to use their core muscles to carefully transfer 'milk'. We then supported the children’s transporting and transforming schemas. The children loved story telling and using orientation schemas to support their core muscles. ☕️

05/02/2025

In order to support gross motor development, we are working on strengthening our core muscles. To do so, the children were walking across the wooden board to develop balance. To make it more challenging, Gemma balanced the board on her legs. The board was then wobbly as they crawled and walked across it.

04/02/2025

Outdoor activities are our favourite. This week our adventures took us to using blue food colouring, vinegar and water for play. We used frozen bicarbonate of soda ice cubes. We noticed that as the ice cubes melted the bicarbonate of soda reacted with the water.

As with any science experiment, it doesn't always go to plan. Therefore, it became about smashing and melting the cubes to get the animals out to tell stories with.

03/02/2025

We are always looking to improve the resources in our setting. However, we accidentally bought tiny wooden bricks instead of big ones. But the children loved them. It allows them to develop a wide range of schemas, including: transportation, trajectory, connection and enclosure. 🧱

02/02/2025

Recently, we have loved playing with playdough on a large scaled. When it's a children's birthday, we ask them what they would like out as an activity. Playdough seems to have become a favourite. Because of this, we decided to make it different and went for large scale playdough as opposed to balls of dough. The children enjoyed a whole hour of interacting with this activity. We kept adding new things to spark their interests like the horses and the cars. The children squeezed, cut, splatted, pinched, pulled and pressed things into the playdough. We used this vocabulary to enrich the children's language development. Playdough is amazing for the development of fine motor skills.

23/01/2025

This week, we have thoroughly enjoyed ice and gloop play. We have been working on our 3D construction skills. We discussed people who live in igloos and why. We tried to stick ice blocks together. We explored how cold the ice was. Our fingers were chilly. We extended our vocabulary to words including freezing, chilly and even painful when you hold the ice cube for too long. Children were transporting their play into another room and then using vessels to transfer them instead when they realised it wasn’t that easy. 🧊

19/01/2025

❄️ Snow Foam ❄️ This week, we made snow foam. For many of our children this was totally new; therefore, they were exploring it for the first time. Some of our older children were using other items around the house to extend their play. This included making cakes and dinner for our friends. Creativity is at the heart of our setting! ❄️

18/01/2025

We have been busy this week exploring red paint and water. In our setting, children are the pilots of their own play. We started off with paint and cars as our children have been taking the cars into the outdoors environment. This play extended to the children adding water to their paint to make a liquid. Through discussion, they decided they were making their own pudding. Great creativity. 🎨🚗