Ideas And Help Needed Re Holiday Care In Nuresry Settng

[ForestFlo]

Hi all,

Our Nursery is registered to take children up to 8yrs in the school holiday and the owner of our nursery would like to develop some holiday themed workshops to encourage take up. It is a new nursery and this will be the first summer it has been open. I would be grateful for any words of wisdom and advice of what sort of themes/activities could work. The group would be age 3-8 y so needs to appeal to all.

So far I thought perhaps an outdoor play day (we have a small wooded area, mud kitchen etc), dinosaurs and possibly an arty day with inside and outside large scale art.

Help!!

Thanks Kirsty

[Melba]

We have considered things like a Science week with lots of experiments and a camping week with tents and a bonfire.

[Guest]

I work with children aged 4-11 years. The best themed week we have done was pirates. We designed treasure maps, making flags, pretend pirate ship outside, walking the plank, etc). The other popular activity we do is junk modelling. Just give the kids lots of boxes and sellotape and see what they create. It is always handy to have a member of staff with a hot glue gun when doing junk modelling to help stick arkward things together.

[HoneyPancakes]

I am a Registered Childminder who does a LOT of after school work - especially with boys. A football goal and other goal-oriented activities are really important - not really topic related, but it's the holidays and some boys really want to belt a ball around all flaming day and will not settle until they've had their fix. Lots of make and do type activities - salt dough, cardboard boxes and tape - can be great for all ages older than babies.

 

Best of luck,

 

Honey

[Guest sn0wdr0p]

I agree with Chocol pirates always goes down really well in my out of school club. Every summer we do a water week with an outing to a fantastic water play area at the park. Back at the club get out the paddling pools and get children to make boats to sail - a few drain pipes for them to sail down into the pools goes down well but best of all (according to the children) are the water fights - some bring along their water guns ( I know some of you will object to guns) and we fill hundreds of water balloons (those fiddly funnels that come with them never work so it does take ages). We do a number of fights according to age as there is no way our little ones stand a chance against the ten year olds - actually neither do we.

 

Just be warned the most popular targets are the staff and we all get absolutely soaked.

 

Obstacle races involving water are also popular. We also regularly go to the seaside.

 

A food week always goes down well here, get the children involved in the cooking following recipes you have prepared for them - these can be added to a recipe book they can create - get them to make covers etc. for them.

We get them to suggest menus for the week. When you bake make sure they have something they can take home with them. We get a chef from the local restaurant to come in one day to cook with them and we also take them to visit the restaurant. The children also make their own chefs hats and decorate their own aprons (Baker Ross etc. have plain canvas ones to decorate) Our children also pick the food from the vegatable patch and we were amazed how many were willing to try salad for the first time.

 

Have fun

sn0wdr0p