— Creative Fun With Foraged Leaves
Today we follow up last month’s leaves scavenger hunt and explore some wonderful creative activities that children can undertake using leaves they have foraged. It’s great timing too, with Autumn having arrived during September. While last month’s article focused on scavenging and learning to recognise different leaves, today’s activity highlights how children can use some of those leaves to get creative and use their imaginations. Such activities combine aspects of Forest School with art, design, and mark-making, so they will be fun, educational, and help children develop various skills. This is also a great way to bring the results of an outdoor, nature-based activity indoors. And, with featured activities including leaf pressing, leaf rubbing, collage, painting, and more, what’s not to love!
Let’s get creative with leaves in the first of our suggested activities for children: leaf printing.
Printing With Leaves
| What’s needed: children will need some leaves with attractive shapes and well-defined structures (e.g. sycamore, oak, maple/acer, beech), some paper, a medium-sized paintbrush, and coloured poster paints. A little hand roller will also help, if available. |
What to do: Printing with leaves is simple, quick, fun, and effective. All children need to do is paint the most textured side of each leaf and then, while the paint is still wet, turn the leaf over, lay it carefully on a paper sheet, and press all areas of it against the paper. That’s where the little hand roller may be useful, if available, otherwise it can be achieved by hand or by dabbing a wad of tissues or fabric against the back of the leaf. Then, carefully peel off the leaf to reveal an intricate leaf print. It’s almost like magic, and the results are often fabulous! Children can experiment with multiple leaf prints, different colours, various leaf shapes and sizes, and generate different designs. Encourage them to experiment to get their creative juices flowing.
Leaf Pressing
| What’s needed: To press leaves, children will need a selection of attractive leaves and something to press the leaves between, e.g. sheets of paper, newsprint, or indeed the pages or a large notepad or book. One or two books will also be useful as weights, although any other reasonably weighty object that has a flat underside will do. |
What to do: Place each leaf, or indeed small flowers, individually between the sheets of paper. Loose newsprint or paper sheets can work, but perhaps the easiest way is to use a large notepad or book; these lend themselves to multiple leaves being pressed at the same time via the double-page spreads within. Lay the closed book (or pile of sheets) on a table and place a flat weighted object on top (an adult may need to supervise young children for this part). Such an object can be anything that’s reasonably weighty and has a flat underside — books are a natural contender for such a purpose. After a few days or a week, your child can check to see if the leaves have dried and flattened. If not, they should check again a few days later. Once flat and dry, your child’s leaves are ready! They are now in a long-lasting state, so make wonderful mementos like bookmarks, and indeed can be used as the key elements for our next activity suggestion below.
Make a Collage with Leaves
| What’s needed: Your child will need some sheets of paper, some child-safe glue, and some leaves. The leaves can be freshly-foraged, although dried and pressed ones are also an excellent choice and may glue more efficiently. |
What to do: The challenge with this activity is for the child to make a nice design on the paper using leaves. So, they could be arranged in an attractive pattern, or as a picture to depict a scene or object. Each leaf simply needs to be glued carefully in place. Designs can also be augmented with extra details using things like twigs, flowers (dried or pressed ones will last longer), leaf stalks, or even extras like lichen or moss. The only limits are the child’s creativity and imagination. Check out some of the examples on this page for inspiration — and get started.
Painted Leaves
| What’s needed: Children will need some reasonably flat leaves, some coloured poster paints, and some paper. |
What to do: This is an easy but effective activity where children simply paint one side of each leaf with coloured paint. Once painted, they look very attractive as art objects but can also be used, once the paint is dry, as part of a picture, display, or collage. This activity is a great opportunity for children to experiment with mixing colours, making new ones, and learning how to choose colours that either contrast or complement one another. Children will soon discover that whichever colour palette is chosen can give the final result a specific mood and feel, whether happy and sunny or muted and cool, for example, depending on the colour combinations.
The Magic of Leaf Rubbings
| What’s needed: This activity requires one or more leaves that have a well-defined structure, ideally with raised ‘veins’ and well-defined surface textures. Children will also need some sheets of thin paper plus either soft pencils, wax crayons, charcoal sticks, or oil pastels. |
What to do: Working on a flat surface like a table or desk, children should lay a leaf, with its most textured side uppermost, under a sheet of the thin paper. Then, bearing in mind the location of the leaf under the sheet, the child should shade from side to side repeatedly over the top to reveal the texture and structure of the underlying leaf. A soft pencil will give better results than a hard one, and using the side of the drawing tip rather than the point will also be easier. Even better is using the side of a stick of charcoal, wax crayon, or oil pastel, as more area can be covered in each single stroke. A variety of colours will help enrich the results, but black and white results are also highly effective. Children can experiment with different media in this way, try using different pressures, different colours, and differently shaped leaves. This task is a particularly good way for children to hone mark-making and fine motor skills.
Draw (or Paint) a Leaf
| What’s needed: Children will need one or more leaves as visual reference (the more attractive the better), and some paints or coloured pencils. |
What to do: The idea of this activity is simply for children to try to draw or paint their own representation of one or more leaves. They can position the leaves somewhere close, like on their desk or table, and see if they can draw them accurately on a sheet of cartridge or sketch paper. It’s a great way for children to practise their powers of observation and hand-eye coordination. How accurately can they accomplish their picture? Alternatively, how well can they achieve different styles of art in their representations? Perhaps showing them some examples of art styles from the Internet or from an art book may inspire them.
Endless Creative Opportunities Using Leaves
The possibilities are endless when it comes to creating art and design inspired by leaves. As well as making attractive designs with leaves, it’s also possible to take things a few steps further. For example, can your child find a leaf shaped like a heart and use it as the key element in a Valentine’s Day card? Can they make an attractive birthday card using leaves arranged to look like a big flower?
Can they incorporate leaves into a collage depicting a scene in a park, with leaves upturned as trees, moss as grass, a flower as the sun, and little twigs or pencil lines added to represent stick people? Can children use pressed flowers to make a lovely bookmark or keepsake for a friend or relative? The list of possibilities is immense! It’s also all great fun and highly creative, while helping children master new skills, use their imaginations, and support multiple areas of the EYFS. And, as we said in last month’s post, it’s something different for children to do indoors, yet still involving nature and elements of Forest School.
Nursery Places for Under-5s in Clayton-le-Woods
High-Quality Weekday Childcare Near Chorley
Little Acorns is a fabulous childcare nursery in Clayton-le-Woods, near Chorley, Lancashire. We cater for children from 3 months to primary school age, and give babies, toddlers, and pre-schoolers a wonderful start in life. Attending this high-quality childcare setting ensures that children are as school-ready as possible by the time they leave us — ready for success!
Little Acorns Nursery has a ‘Good’ Ofsted rating and supports funded childcare hours for eligible children as young as just 9 months. Forest School sessions are popular at Little Acorns Nursery, as are our comprehensive facilities that include a brand new Sensory Room. The nursery opens early, at 7:30 a.m., and stays open until 6:00 p.m. — very convenient for working families.
Register for a nursery place today, or simply get in touch with any queries or to arrange a guided visit with your child:
Little Acorns is a childcare nursery in Clayton-le-Woods, near Chorley, representing a convenient choice for anyone living nearby in towns and villages that include Clayton Brook, Clayton Green, Penwortham, Farington, Bamber Bridge, Whittle-le-Woods, Lostock Hall, Leyland, Pippin Street, Buckshaw Village, Thorpe Green and Euxton.
Little learners, get ready – it’s almost time to buzz into action for World Bee Day! The annual event arrives in May and it’s a brilliant opportunity for children and families to get involved in something meaningful, fun, and full of learning opportunities.
World Bee Day is celebrated every year on 20th May to raise awareness of the vital role that bees and other pollinators play in our world. From helping plants grow and supporting the food we eat every day, bees are some of nature’s hardest workers – and they need our help to survive and thrive.
“Bee together for people and the planet”
Getting involved in World Bee Day isn’t just fun — it also supports many areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), helping children learn and grow in meaningful, hands-on ways. Here are just a few ways bee-related activities can support early development:
Expressive Arts and Design: Making bee crafts, drawing flowers, role-playing as working bees, or moving like insects in a dance — all help develop creativity and imagination.
There are so many fun and simple ways for little learners to join in with World Bee Day! Here are a few activities that are perfect for children under five — each one encourages creativity, curiosity, and care for nature while also supporting the EYFS.
Using paper plates, cardboard tubes, egg cartons or recycled materials, children can create their own bees! Add wings, stripes, googly eyes and antennae for a hands-on creative session. These are wonderfully creative activities that will boost several areas of the EYFS including Expressive Arts & Design and Physical Development.
Explore the garden or outdoor space and, without disturbing them, see what pollinators your child can spot. Can they see any bees? What colours and flowers do they seem to like best? Are they collecting nectar? What type of bees are they? Bumblebees are super cute. Honey bees are super-hard workers and do so much for the world. A bee-spotting activity is a great opportunity to explore areas of the EYFS that include Understanding the World and Communication & Language.
Once babies have transformed into toddlers, it’s never too early to introduce them to maths-based concepts and language. Indeed, introducing under-fives to such concepts in the earliest years will benefit them hugely as it lays the foundations for future learning. That’s one of the main reasons it is a part of 
Familiarity with mathematical terms and concepts also helps to prepare children for formal education, including in many areas other than pure mathematics. Understanding maths concepts from an early age will allow them to confidently engage in number-related exercises and discussions, greatly enhancing their school readiness across multiple topics. Such preparation will allow them to take maths-based challenges in their stride right from the moment they begin Reception Year in primary school. What’s even more striking is that studies show a direct correlation between early mathematical skills and later educational achievement.
Counting is the most obvious example. Counting can be introduced and practised by your little one in many, many situations, from counting how many more mouthfuls of food a child should eat, to the number of Lego blocks in a tower they’re creating.
Shapes also have roots in maths, so children should get familiar with 3-sided triangular shapes, 4-sided shapes like squares and rectangles, and so on.
Creative endeavours can also be vehicles through which supervising adults can highlight elements of mathematics that are built into designs and creations that children may generate. Patterns and shapes are obvious examples of that. Last but not least, parents can involve children in maths facets which are integral to everyday life, for instance, counting items when out shopping, or measuring when putting ingredients together for a meal. Children will love being more involved in such activities and will learn about maths in a fun, natural, and engaging way. Doing so will create the strongest foundations for their future learning.
Today, we look at how early years childcare providers like Little Acorns Nursery can help children under five if they have special educational needs and disabilities. This is often referred to as ‘SEND’ or in longer forms like ‘SEN and disabilities’. Let’s explore the topic to get an overview of some of the help available.
Actually identifying an area of special need or disability is, of course, the first, crucial step in being able to help a child. If an area of special need is suspected, early years providers can work with parents and sometimes other professionals, for example health visitors, speech and language therapists, paediatricians and so on. Involving such professionals will help with any diagnosis.
This is important. Early years providers can create an inclusive environment that welcomes and supports children of all abilities. Encouraging the inclusion of children in social groups and in the making of friends, for example, is of huge benefit to children’s well-being. Childcare settings can also provide special equipment or adapt the environment to make it more accessible for children with specific physical needs.
Early years providers like Little Acorns Nursery adapt the individual learning and development plans and activities to suit each child. In this way, they’re custom-designed to meet the needs of every child individually, including those with special needs. This is done as a matter of course as part of 
Later, each child will similarly have an ‘EYFS profile’ completed during the final term of reception year. However, as we’re focusing this article on children under five, we’ll not go into detail about that here.
It may be useful for parents and carers to note that local authorities have a duty to publish what’s known as a ‘Local Offer’. This outlines the help available in the area for children with SEND, including how to access that support.
Every 2-year-old attending registered childcare settings in England is subject to what’s known as a ‘Progress Check at 2’. Today we explain what it entails, who is involved and how it benefits little ones. Here’s our rough guide to the Progress Check at 2:
The Progress Check at 2 should not be confused with the Healthy Child Programme’s 2-Year Review that 2-year-olds also undergo around the same age. While the ‘Progress Check at 2’ looks at the child’s learning and development progress and is the topic of today’s guide, the separate ‘2 Year Review’ is more about the child’s health and wellbeing and is undertaken by healthcare professionals like health visitors. They will look at things like overall health, immunisation uptake, physical and mental health and development, overall wellbeing and support levels from parents, carers or guardians.
The three ‘prime’ areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum are also the core focus areas of the Progress Check at 2. Hence, the checks will look to see how well the child is progressing primarily in their:
The core idea behind the Progress Check at 2 is to discover whether progress is at expected levels for the child’s age and development.
If you are looking for the very best childcare provision for your child in Central Lancashire, there are a multitude of reasons why you should choose Little Acorns Nursery. Put simply, Little Acorns offers the very best possible childcare service for under-fives — but you don’t need to take our word for it. This is independently verified, as you’ll see below. Take a look at our top 20 reasons to choose Little Acorns Nursery and you’ll soon see why it’s virtually impossible to beat when it comes to outstanding childcare provision.
The quality of teaching, learning and assessment at the nursery was also found to be simply outstanding when Ofsted appraised us. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Little Acorns Nursery has received a number of awards for it’s healthy eating policy. These include a Recipe 4 Health Award and accreditation via the Smiling For Life Award. Each recognises the healthy meals and snacks that we provide to children under our care.
It almost goes without saying that, of course, Little Acorns Nursery has a 5-star food hygiene rating. Once again, that’s the topmost rating. Quality and professionalism are, after all, at the heart of everything we do.
Everything we do at the nursery has a purpose, whether it’s a customised approach to learning for a specific child, the choice of a particular activity or game for another, the purchase of a piece of new equipment, or the way we keep parents informed about their child’s progress each day — there is a reason for everything we do. Ultimately, our goal is to give every child the very best start in life and to equip them to achieve their personal best in every area. In this way, they are given the tools to achieve the very best outcomes in their lives.
Our Forest School should be open from Autumn 2022. Children love Forest School and it teaches them so much about nature, the natural world and ultimately about themselves. 
Last year, we wrote a detailed post outlining 
Interestingly, under-five children who came from disadvantaged backgrounds were shown to benefit even more than those who didn’t. For this reason, reading with parents/carers has been proposed as a possible way to close the performance deficit often seen with children from such backgrounds. It may well represent a perfect solution to even up the playing field.
Deeper bonds with parents/carers (after all, this is quality time spent together, one-to-one);
Communication & Language is the first of the three prime areas of our EYFS-based curriculum. Without good communication and language skills, all other areas of learning could suffer, so these are critically important skills for children to master in their early years. Staff at the nursery therefore encourage rich communications between staff and children — and from peer to peer — from the very first day they join the nursery. Language and communication skills grow naturally to children through engaging, fun activities like role-play, story-telling and question-and-answer games. High quality books and other rich reading materials are also employed by staff to read with children in an interactive way. Using these kind of approaches helps children to learn new vocabulary and grammar, to improve reading and comprehension and to almost effortlessly broaden their language and communication skills as they grow.
coordination and fitness among the children at every stage. This is all done incrementally through a physical development programme that’s custom-designed for each individual child. This tailored programme takes consideration of their natural abilities, preferences and, of course, any disabilities or limitations. As they grow, the programme of fun, physical activities will help every child to reach their own personal bests for traits like fitness, balance, coordination, hand-eye coordination, agility and spatial awareness. In turn these physical improvements will help with their general wellbeing and happiness. And, at all times, the children will have been having immense fun, making friends and improving social skills, self-confidence and more along the way.
The social and emotional aspects of it aim to help children fit in with adults and peers around them, support one another, themselves feel supported by others and together learn to manage emotions and behave in acceptable, appropriate ways. As they learn to do all of this, they will become more confident, feel rightly valued, more easily resolve any conflicts and form closer friendships with peers and create stronger bonds with staff. All of this will act as a social and emotional foundation to build everything else upon.
Literacy is the first of the remaining four areas of focus. A curriculum would be sadly lacking if children didn’t end up literate at the end of study. Literacy is absolutely fundamental and will give each young child the very best start when they leave early years settings to start school. On the face of it, it’s all about reading and writing. However, getting these right will help with many other areas of learning. At Little Acorns, we encourage nursery children to take enjoyment from reading. After all, once they can read they will understand so much more about the world from non-fiction material and so much more about the possibilities of the imagination and creativity from fiction books. So, they have access to a wide, rich variety of reading materials. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, phonetics and overall comprehension of a huge variety of topics will all go hand-in-hand with active and regular reading. In a similar way, writing will benefit too, as the children learn to recognise the correct spelling, composition and sentence structure and so on. Exposure to our rich variety of books will feed their imaginations and help them to be more creative themselves. We also encourage our children to verbalise, for example by reading out loud to themselves and others in an interactive way. By so doing, speech, pronunciation and articulation also benefit, as does their confidence to speak up.
Mathematics is our fifth area of study within the core EYFS curriculum at Little Acorns Nursery. It’s another fundamental skill that children need to learn but, as with everything at Little Acorns, we make it fun. Through play and interactive sessions, children will learn the concepts behind mathematics, soon learning to distinguish things like odd and even numbers, number patterns and sequences, concepts like larger or smaller, wider or taller and more or less. Counting will first be mastered from one to ten, then in reverse, then extended to 20 or more. Concepts like volume, shape, measuring and space will also be included. So, by the time they leave our early years setting, they’ll have learnt the requisite maths skills and concepts that they’ll need in order to hit the ground running when they start school.
After all, there is so much around them and they need to understand it and to give everything they see context. With that in mind, we’ll help them to recognise, understand, describe and even sometimes draw what’s immediately around them. They will also learn about the technology they see and use around them. Our excellent 
A wide variety of media, equipment and tools are available to them at the nursery and activities encourage the children to get involved and to create. It’s not just art, though; the children can involve themselves in role-play activities, they can sing, dance, tell stories and perform. Their imaginations can run riot and be free as they can express themselves and their creativity in a rich variety of ways.
Indeed, parents can be thought of as key to their children’s success, if they support children’s education in the right ways. We’ll go through exactly what that means, along with some of the many benefits, in this article.
Choose the Right Setting
Parents of successful, grade A students, will generally also have engaged with staff at nursery/pre-school and school. That includes at parents’ evenings, of course, but parents should also be fully abreast of their child’s progress at every point in between. Parents and staff need to talk and feed back to each other about each child under their care and, indeed, that’s exactly what we do at Little Acorns Nursery. This, and a personal development progress folder for every child, is all part of the EYFS curriculum at the nursery in fact. In this way, parents and staff can each see the bigger picture and identify where successes are happening for the child, or where more work is needed — including at home.
Parents can help children with homework too, of course. They can explain things that the child is perhaps confused or unclear about, in an unrushed, relaxed home environment. Parents can work through their approach to finding answers to questions and explain how they arrived at those answers. This, too, is like gold dust to an otherwise struggling child. It’s one of the reasons why the human race itself has come such a long way — through shared information.
• In turn, that ultimately leads to better careers as adults, with higher rates of pay.
