A healthy lifestyle is crucially important for health and wellbeing at any age, but it’s even more important in the early years. At this age, children are still at a critical time in their physical and mental development. We wrote last month about the need for healthy eating for toddlers and preschoolers and now follow this up by exploring the importance of exercise and active play for under fives.
The Importance of Exercise for Under-Fives
Generally speaking, under-fives should be encouraged to be active. There are many benefits of this including remaining physically fit, getting to know and enhancing physical abilities, honing motor skills (fine and gross) and improving coordination and balance. In addition, it helps the very young to develop visual and sensory skills. Physical activity is also part and parcel of the development of new neurological pathways in the brain. All these skills and benefits will become increasingly important as children grow, develop and become ever-more active and independent.
Exercise for Babies — Tummy Time
Exercise for babies comes in the form of light, active play. At this early age, even starting as newborns, they can begin via floor activities known commonly as Tummy Time. Here, the supervising adult places them on their stomach on a suitably comfy, safe and soft area of the floor and encourages them to move their head, arms and legs.
Close supervision is essential for your baby’s safety and, of course, the baby must always be awake when they’re in this ‘prone’ position
Allowing babies to move on their tummies will help to strengthen limbs, neck, shoulder and back muscles and also help the infant to develop their motor, coordination and visual skills. It’s also believed to help babies avoid ‘positional conditions’, including the development of skull deformations and neck problems. As we mentioned before, it even helps babies’ brains to form new neural pathways.
Tummy time should last only 3 to 5 minutes when they first start as young babies, with the infants attempting it only 2 to 3 times over the course of each day initially. As they grow towards the age of 12 months, this can be slowly increased to suit the baby’s increasing strength and physical abilities. Eventually, the baby will be able to roll over sideways in both directions, be able to sit and self-direct — and may indeed be crawling by the time they’re around 7 to 9 months of age.
Exercise for Toddlers
By the time they are toddlers (1-2 years old), they will usually have mastered all of the above and be adept at self-directing, grasping, pulling, pushing and moving around unaided. Indeed, toddlers should now be active each day for around 3 hours in total (split across a few sessions). Now they’re this age, toddlers’ active play and exercise can include light activities such as standing up, playing actively, rolling and moving around. It should also include more energetic activities (safely – so supervision and a safe environment are needed) like running, hopping, skipping and jumping. Activities like ball games are also great at this age, as are use of appropriate climbing frames and even riding tricycles if they’re able to do so safely.
Exercise for Preschoolers
Once they reach the age of 3 to 4 (preschoolers), 3 hours of physical activity is an ideal daily minimum. Now that they’re older and more confident in their physical skills, they can continue with the toddler activities but add more complex and moderately vigorous options to their play. Dancing, swimming, scooting, climbing, chasing, cycling and energetic outdoor activities are good examples.
Avoiding Too Much Inactivity (… & TV!)
What’s equally important is to avoid letting children remain inactive for long periods of time. Hours each day spent in front of screens like tablets, mobiles, games consoles and TVs is not good for them. Moreover, doing so for long periods when they’re at such formative ages sets up a dangerous pattern of behaviour that might be hard to break. It could also lead to health and wellbeing issues like becoming overweight or even obese. In fact, a staggering 20% of children are overweight or obese before they even start school, according to NHS data. What’s more, they say that 9 out of 10 children aged between two and four are not doing sufficient levels of physical activity to meet recommendations from the UK’s Chief Medical Officers. Worrying statistics!
Exercise & Active Play at Little Acorns Nursery, Chorley
Babies, toddlers and preschoolers learn through play at Little Acorns Nursery. This means that physical activity comes naturally, forming a key part in keeping children active and adequately exercised as they develop. Indeed, it’s all embedded as part of the nursery’s EYFS curriculum, particularly in the Physical Development module. As such, children use the huge variety of physical activities on offer at the nursery to improve mobility, coordination, balance, physical fitness, hand-eye coordination, agility, physical strength and so on. This is all done through a learning and development plan that’s tailored to the strengths, weaknesses and preferences of each individual child. The Key Person is a member of staff assigned to oversee the progress of each child and goals are set and milestones recorded. In this way, every child will achieve personal bests during their time with Little Acorns, becoming well-rounded, ‘school-ready’ individuals by the time they’re five.
Nursery Places Available in Clayton-le-Woods, Chorley
We sometimes have a few places available at our nursery in Clayton-le-Woods, near Clayton Green and Clayton Brook, Chorley. Do get in touch if you’d potentially like a place for your son or daughter. As well as being the outright winner of a stunning National award, it’s one of only a few Lancashire nurseries recognised by Ofsted as Outstanding and is also a Forest School. This allows your child to also enjoy and learn from everything that nature and the outdoors have to offer. Register with us if you are interested, or contact us while nursery places are available — we’d love to hear from you. See the following options:
Eating a healthy, balanced diet is important at any age. However, during their formative years when they’re still growing, it’s even more important for under-fives. Their young bodies and brains are still developing, so getting the right balance of food types, vitamins and nutrients is essential in order to maintain optimum health, cognitive function and even sufficient energy levels. (Regular exercise is also essential, of course – however, we’ll cover that separately in a future post).
That’s a huge and important list of benefits. Advice from Public Health England also suggests that exposing children to a wide variety of different foods from an early age not only gives them access to greater diversity in what they eat, but is also likely to make children more accepting of new foods as they grow older. And, of course, that greater diversity in food types means a more diverse range of nutrients, vitamins and minerals will be consumed.
As part of a healthy diet, children should try to eat something from each of the four main food groups every day. These are:
Dairy products, which give children much-needed calcium, Vitamins A and B, potassium and more. Aim for 3 portions of dairy products per day. Examples include milk, yoghurt and cheese. Use full-fat options for toddlers and then, from the age of 2, switch to semi-skimmed varieties.
At Little Acorns we are serious about playing our part and serve up healthy, balanced meals each day to our children along with suitable drinks and healthy snack options. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon and teatime snacks are all provided and included in our standard nursery fees. Food is prepared each day by Judy, our wonderful in-house chef, using the highest quality, fresh ingredients, sourced from local suppliers. Food allergens are extremely carefully monitored and managed. Any special diets, e.g. vegan or vegetarian, are also catered for as needed — simply forewarn us about any specific requirements and we’ll be happy to accommodate them.
Little Acorns Nursery has a 
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.
Little Acorns Nursery offers Forest School sessions* and, indeed, was the first childcare setting in the Chorley area to offer them. Many parents understand that ‘Forest School’ offers children outdoor discovery sessions where they can explore nature and all that the Great Outdoors has to offer. However, what’s it really about? What is the ethos behind it? How did it come about and what is its history? Perhaps most importantly, what are its benefits to children? Here we’ll answer all those questions and more, in our Ultimate Guide to Forest School.
The biggest influence, however, came from Scandinavia and the play-based, child-centric educational system of Denmark’s outdoors (‘friluftsliv’) approach to early years education. Their revolutionary outdoor system was hugely successful, so nursery staff from Bridgewater College in Somerset visited Denmark to see it in action for themselves. They were so impressed that they founded the first Forest School, following their return to the UK, in 1993.
With a focus on nature and the natural world, Forest School sessions take place outdoors, ideally in natural, woodland settings. If that’s not possible, natural areas containing trees would be the next best setting, although more urban locations may necessitate the use of school grounds if no woodlands are available locally. In that scenario, practitioners would bring in natural materials such as sticks, logs, fir cones and so on.
Forest Schools focus on each child’s individual interests, skills, preferences and needs as well as balancing them with those of the whole group. Indeed, this builds a community that’s immersed in this natural environment, learning from it and also from one another. Play is a huge part of this and, as always, ensures that learning is immense fun.
Nature teaches children so much — about flora, fauna and the make-up of the world (of course); but it also teaches children about themselves. Children will learn or discover new hard and soft skills when out in the natural world. They’ll discover skills that they didn’t know they had. Leadership, critical thinking, team-working and problem-solving are just a few examples.
“Exceptionally Effective Observation & Assessment” of Children
Outstanding Personal Development, Behaviour & Welfare
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