Jennifer Activities for childminders, Childminding best practice, Diversity Topics, Themes

25 Childminding topics to explore in Spring

Spring topics for childminders. Baby animals.

One good way of using topics to plan your work is to plan topics that help reflect the changing of the seasons. Are you looking for some good topics to explore with children in Spring? Here are some ideas:

Well-loved themes:

  1. Baby animals.
  2. Spring life cycles.
  3. Easter
  4. Spring

Some slightly different ideas:

Spring themes for childminders. Spring flowers, primroses
  1. Gardening. Spring is a fantastic time to plant seeds and explore gardening with children.
  2. Frogs. World Frog Day is on the 20th of March
  3. Trees.
  4. Weather. Spring is a time of very changeable weather so is a good time to explore a weather themed topic with children
  5. Mini-beasts.
  6. Spring flowers.
  7. How about some nursery rhymes that tie in nicely with a Spring topic, like ‘5 Speckled Frogs’ ‘Mary had a little lamb,’ ‘Little Bo Peep’ or ‘5 Little Ducks.’
  8. Watch me grow. As children watch other things like baby animals or flowers growing they may also become interested in how they grow.
  9. Bees. World Bee Day is on the 20th of May
  10. On the Farm.
  11. Birds.
Diversity ideas for childminders, St David's day

Diversity themes to explore in Spring

  1. St David’s Day 1st of March
  2. May Day
  3. St Partick’s Day 17th of March
  4. Holi
  5. Mother’s Day
  6. St George’s Day. The patron saint of England has a special day on the 23rd of April

Some more unusual (but fun) themes to explore in Spring

  1. Washing. Spring cleaning anyone? Children can have lots of fun with soapy bubbles washing toys and themselves! A good topic to help enforce good hygiene practices in your children.
  2. Earth Day
  3. World Laughter Day (3rd May)
  4. Turtles. World Turtle Day on the 23rd of May

Written 08/05/2023

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Good (and terrible) ways to use themes

When planning your curriculum it is important to think about how you are going to introduce children to new ideas and experiences. Using themes or topics is one good way to help you do this.

Read more

10 Easy Vegetables, Fruits and Herbs for Childminders to grow with Children

Growing edible produce with children is a fantastic way to help them learn about all sorts of things, from life cycles to how food is grown, to healthy eating.

Read more
Jennifer Activities for childminders, Childminding best practice

10 Easy Vegetables, Fruits and Herbs for Childminders to grow with Children

Written 01/04/2023

garden centres sell lots of vegetables that you can grow with childminding children

Growing edible produce with children is a fantastic way to help them learn about all sorts of things, from life cycles to how food is grown, to healthy eating.

Spring is a good time to start thinking about which things you might want to have go at growing with your children. We grow a variety of vegetables, fruits and herbs with the childminding children every year – all with varying degrees of success. (All of the things I mention here have been grown in a coastal area of northern England where it quite exposed and rains A LOT! I have chosen plants that should do well anywhere, but you may need to experiment a little to find plants that will thrive where you live.)

I never use any pesticides of any sort – I don’t want to risk such nasty chemicals around children, and they are utterly terrible for nature. Therefore all of our produce is shared with the wildlife in our garden – whether they have been invited to or not! Don’t worry too much if you only manage to grow small amounts of wonky veg. The main thing is having a go, having fun and helping the children learn a bit about growing food.

Vegetables

Childminding child helping 'chit' potatoes. Childminding Best Practice poster resource in background.

1.Potatoes. These have to be some of the easiest vegetables to grow as they are not fussy about where they grow. We have grown potatoes in special potato bags, half filled compost bags and even buckets! You can experiment with ‘rooty’ shop bought potatoes but ones that you buy from garden centres are a little better as they are treated to prevent rot, etc. You can usually buy a large bag of these for less than £5 which also makes them very economical.

2. Carrots. We have never had amazing success at growing beautiful large carrots, but we have always managed to grow something. I like to get special seed mixes of multicoloured carrots as the children are always amazed when they pull up orange, yellow, white and purple carrots! Carrots are a bit funny about being handled so I would avoid ready grown seedlings if you are planting with toddlers – they are just too easy to damage! Instead let the children sprinkle seeds on compost in a tub. You can then thin out the seedlings later if you want to. (Especially if you have children like mine that ‘sprinkle’ (aka dump!) all their seeds in one corner leaving the rest of the soil completely bare!) Tip: leave a good couple of inches between the top of the soil and the top of your container. This helps prevent your carrots getting ‘carrot fly’, a kind of pest that will only fly at certain heights meaning leaving a gap hides your carrots from them – weird but true!

3. Peas are fairly easy to grow and come in lots of different varieties. You can buy seedlings or seeds from a garden centre. You can even grow peas using whole dried peas bought from the dried food aisle of the supermarket. (Something I discovered during lockdown when you were not allowed to go out to the garden centre.) Although these do not tend to be as sweet as other varieties this is an excellent way to grow peas on a budget! If you have lots of hungry slugs and snails in your garden wait until your pea plants are a little larger before planting them outside to give them a fighting chance. Peas need plenty of watering to grow nice fat pods, but the children will love picking and eating the sweet raw peas. (Very few of ours actually make inside as they get eaten as soon as they are picked!)

4. Cabbage. If you want to explore the life cycle of the butterfly in a natural ‘free range’ way I recommend planting cabbages! We have grown endless amounts of caterpillars and butterflies this way! However if you fancy your chances at actually being able to eat some of your cabbages I recommend trying the following. These methods are not completely fool (caterpillar) proof but at least you will stand a fighting chance!

  1. Cover your cabbages with very fine butterfly netting (ask at your garden centre or look on-line.) Make sure the netting does not touch the cabbages as butterflies can be very sneaky about laying caterpillar eggs through the netting. Believe me I know. My husband built as a special ‘cabbage cage’ one year which mostly kept the caterpillars off, but I still found chrysalises inside it at the end of the year!
  2. Plant your cabbages really early in the season before butterflies are thinking about waking up.
  3. Employ eagle eyed children to spot the tiny eggs and/or baby caterpillars. These can then be removed and placed on a sacrificial cabbage. (This is the least effective method as you must do it every day.)

Fruit

5. Tomatoes. Living in a northerly exposed sort of place without a greenhouse, tomatoes have been a bit hit or miss for us. However we have had some success by experimenting with different varieties. If like us you do not have somewhere suitable outside you ask at your garden centre, as they should be able to recommend smaller varieties, some of which can be grown on a large windowsill inside. You can also experiment with growing tomato plants by putting a slice from a shop bought tomato onto some compost, covering slightly and keeping watered. You may be surprised how many plants you can grow using this method.

6. Strawberries. These are another relatively bomb proof crop to grow with children. I have never managed to grow plants from seed and this is very fiddly with children involved. Instead buy a selection of different strawberry varieties and let the children plant them in tubs or containers. They are robust plants so will withstand a bit of rough toddler handling. Some of your plants may grow long stems with baby plants on the end. If you want the ‘mother plant’ to have more strawberries you can cut these off, but I tend to shove a couple into soil each year, (leave the stem attached until they are established,) as this is a good way of getting free plants! Talk to the children about how the flowers will turn into strawberries. You can cover your plants with mesh to help prevent birds eating them, but you may have to race other critters such as slugs and snails to your bounty. Get the children in the habit of checking under the leaves to find ripe strawberries every day.

Herbs

7. Rosemary. This is a really good herb to grown with small children as they are robust and happily withstand a bit of toddler handling. They also thrive on a bit of neglect, preferring poor soil. I have a large one growing in a container made from old car tires and smaller ones which grew from cuttings off the original plant.

8. Mint. This is another herb which is usually easy to grow. It comes in lots of different varieties and I have quite a few as they smell so nice when you brush up against them. Look for varieties like peppermint, spearmint, apple-mint, chocolate mint and others. When the leaves grow you can show the children how to pick them and put them in hot water to make mint teas. DO NOT plant directly into soil in your garden unless you want it to take over, keep contained in a pot instead.

Windowsill plants

9. Cress. This is often grown with young children as it grows so quickly, meaning that impatient little ones do not have long to wait until they can see the fruits of their labours. You can plant directly onto a thick sheet of kitchen roll as long as you remember to keep it well watered or make things like decorated cress heads made out of empty eggshells.

10. Salad leaves. You can find seed mixes of salad leaves in lots of garden centres. These can be planted in trays on a sunny windowsill and should provide a good selection of leaves that children can pick to eat with their lunch. Look for cut and come again varieties which will provide a continual supply of leaves.

Whatever you decide to have a go at growing, whether it be potatoes, strawberries or just lots and lots of hungry mini-beasts, have fun!

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Forest Childcare Association

The Forest Childcare Association is a best practice initiative for childcare providers who want to demonstrate their commitment to taking small children outdoors on a regular basis. By making a commitment to regular outdoor outings you can make a discernible difference to your children AND your business. When you join you will receive a Forest Childcare Starter Pack containing training information as well as business tools, a certificate to display and 50 Crafts and Activities to get you started.

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Britain doesn’t have a lot of really nasty poisonous plants, but as childminders there are a few you should be able to recognise. Some plants can make you very ill if you eat them or give you a nasty skin rash if you touch them. Do you know which ones they are?

Do you have a poison garden?

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Learning with Traditional Tales – Sharing stories with my childminder

Written 07/01/2023

This time of year when the excitement of Christmas is over, but the weather is still cold and grey is a fantastic time to create a bit of cosiness by curling up with a traditional tale or two. Reading stories to children is an essential activity to help children learn speech and communication skills and helping children learn new stories also enhances their cultural capital. Sharing traditional stories can help us feel connected to our own childhoods and are part of our wider cultural heritage. There is also a fantastic wealth of life lessons that can be learned by thinking about the messages contained in these stories.

When choosing a traditional tale to share with your children it can help to think about the following:

  1. What stories do the children already know? Do you want to focus more on one you have already read so that all the children can get to know it really well, or do you want to introduce a completely new story?
  2. Consider the cultural background of the children you care for. Do you share stories that reflect their culture and history? Perhaps the children’s parents can suggest some stories that they shared when they were little.
  3. Have you got any learning intentions you want to be able to tie into the story, for example learning about sizes or stranger danger with ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears,’ the importance of helping out with ‘The Little Red Hen,’ or simple counting skills with ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff.’
  4. Are you going to read the story from a book? If so think about the language in the version you have chosen. Do they have any repeating phrases that can help children learn language? Is the language challenging enough with different words to learn but not too hard to understand that the children loose interest? There tends to be lots of different versions of traditional tales so you can find one suitable for the age and developmental stage of the children in your care.
  5. Do the children actually like the story? A story can fulfil all of the above requirements but if the children do not engage with it then it is pretty pointless!

Tips for getting the most out of the story when reading it with the children:

  1. Read the story several times until the children get to know it. (This can be done over a few days – you do not need to sit there reading it on loop!) Make sure all the children know the story well. By doing this you are helping increase each child’s cultural capital.
  2. When the children know the story well enough to anticipate which part of the story comes next encourage them to join in with repeated phrases and new words.
  3. Get the children to act out the story while you read it to them. Can they make up different actions to go with different parts or characters of the story?
  4. Can the children think of simple changes they would like to introduce to the story. For example if you are reading ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears,’ maybe the bears have pancakes for breakfast instead of porridge? This helps children take ownership of the story and also begin to understand the structures of storytelling.

Tips for telling the story to children instead of reading it from a book:

Although reading books to children is important there may be times that you simply want to tell the children a story instead. Telling a story without having a book to hold means you can have your hands free to use puppets or gestures to emphasise the words. It also means that, if you have a larger group of children that have to sit in front of you while you read, that there is no physical barrier between you and the children, meaning that you can relate more directly to them and their responses to the story. (In childminding settings with just one or two children this isn’t such an issue as they will normally be sitting on your knee as you read to them.)

  1. Use your body language and gestures to help tell the story. If a character is feeling cold, wrap your arms around yourself and shiver dramatically, if a giant appears, shade your eyes and peer upwards as if looking at them. Using gestures like this to emphasise your words will help children understand the story even if they cannot see any pictures. Encourage the children to copy your actions. In this way even non-verbal children can join in and show their understanding of the story.
  2. Think about how you can use your voice as you tell the story. Use a quiet voice when a character is creeping up to someone or a loud voice if you are pretending to be a giant! Children love it if you use different voices for different characters but don’t make voices too silly as this will distract the children from the story itself.
  3. Don’t think that you can’t move about. Why not tell a story outside and when the characters move – so do you! As long as the story remains the main focus you can act out running from a dragon, trip trapping over a bridge or climbing up a beanstalk.

Things to do so that children and parents can extend their learning:

  1. Provide puppets and props (don’t forget dressing up props if they are suitable for the story and you have them!) for the children to tell the story themselves during free play.
  2. Leave the story book somewhere accessible to the children so that they can request it when they want you to read it to them even when you have moved onto other books or stories.
  3. Share versions of the story with the children’s parents so that they can help continue the learning at home. (Worried about lending out your precious books to forgetful parents? Check out the solution below!)

Products that can help you explore traditional stories with your children:

Members of the Childminding Best Practice Club receive monthly toolkits bursting with information, ideas and support. These include special Traditional Tale focused Toolkits.

These toolkits have a wealth of resources to help you share traditional tales with your children. Including things like:

Specially rewritten and illustrated childminder friendly versions of different traditional tales. Print out as many copies as you need to share with parents.

Resources to compliment the story such as posters or games.

Ideas for crafts and activities you can do to go with the story theme.

Full set of planning covering every area of learning.

Hand drawn colouring sheet

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Eight essential books for childminders of very young children

Books are a must have in every childminding and early years setting. I love children’s books and have a vast collection that I picked up over the years, from classic early years books that everyone will recognise through to rare books that are out of publication and on to brand new books which have just hit the shelves in bookshops. I am still discovering beautiful new books all the time and could probably end up filling my whole house. I think it is very important to introduce books to children as soon as possible so my collection also includes lots of books aimed at the very youngest children. However, if I could only have eight books for babies these would be my absolute essentials:

1) An early years classic to carry on traditions:

One of the very special things about reading books to small children is that it creates lovely memories for both the adult and the child. I read about a question an Ofsted Inspector recently asked a childminder: ‘which books have you read to the children so often that they know all the words?’ This possibly does not apply to our youngest children who are not yet speaking so I would ask, ‘which book have you read so often that the children will remember it when they read it to their children?’

You may have a book that you remember reading to your own children or one that you were read as a small child. Ask the child’s parents if they have a special book that they would like to share too. For example:

Part of a childminder’s role is to build relationship with the child and their family and sharing a special story in this way is a lovely way to start. When the child leaves your setting a lovely parting gift can be a copy of your ‘special’ book.

2) An interactive book:

Books with sturdy flaps to lift, textures to feel or holes to peep and poke fingers through are always on my must have list for babies and very young children. For example:

Any of the ‘That’s Not My’ books. I have a small collection of these as the favourite depends on what each child is interested in. Currently ‘That’s not My Car’ is a firm favourite and I have expanded my own car related vocabulary reading this book too!

3) A book about people:

Children are born with an instinctive fascination with other people and humans are programmed to recognise faces from birth. Chose books with a variety of different people so that children can see people that look like them and people that are different. For the very youngest children chose books that mainly feature pictures of faces as this is what babies are most interested in. For example:

Babies love looking at other babies so if you have very young children a book like this is a must. If possible, look for books featuring photographs of babies as this will appeal to very young children more than illustrated versions. One good example is ‘Baby Faces’ by the published DK, which shows babies from different backgrounds, pulling a variety of expressions. This has proved very popular in my setting.

4) A book about the wider world:

Keep this simple. For very young children almost everything is ‘the wider world.’ A good place to start is a book about animals. Young children love animals and some of the first words they speak may very well be animals sounds. Try and choose books with a good range of vocabulary. For example, I recently discovered some lift the flap animal books by Jane Ormes that feature farm animal families including Jack and Jenny donkeys!

5) A book that feature the children’s interests:

From a very early age children will start to develop interests. Even before they can say many words a child may be able to spot a ‘trador’ (tractor) from so far away that you are amazed that they can even see it or will point out every car that goes past. Tuning into these interests and providing books that feature them will help children learn that books are fun. If you are clever with your choices, it can also help children learn other things, not necessarily related to their main passion.

For example, I have recently discovered a book which is an absolute favourite in my setting. It is called’ Rosa Loves Cars,’ by Jessica Spanyol. It features a little girl and a wider cast of diverse friends who love cars and has lots of simple car related vocabulary that the little ones love to try and copy. I love the book because it challenges gender stereotypes and promotes diversity; the little ones love the book because it features cars. Everyone is happy!

6) A nursery rhyme book:

Reading anything to children will help with their language development but some books are more specifically aimed at helping young children with this essential skill. Nursery rhyme books fall into this category.

Traditional Tales are too long and complicated for very young children (although they are FABULOUS a little later,) but nursery rhymes are excellent for helping children acquire language skills. Their rhyming and rhythmic structure helps children remember and learn words and tune into the rise and fall patterns of speech.  

There are lots and lots of sturdy board books featuring nursery rhymes, but my favourites are the ‘Child’s Play’ series. These books keep the rhyme nice and short and do not extend the rhyme with additional verses like some other nursery rhyme books. This makes them more suitable for younger children with shorter concentration spans. They also have lovely illustrations showing actions the children can do to accompany the rhyme. You can often pick these books up in charity shops so keep your eyes peeled.

7) A good quality first words book:

There are lots of these about from short board books concentrating on different topics like colours or numbers (you can borrow these sorts of books by the bucket load from your local library) to longer versions with almost every word you could ever want, accompanied by a picture. However, the most popular ones in my setting have always been those with pictures of scenes with lots of things to look at, spot and talk about. For example, in my setting the favourite is, ‘Thomas’s Word Book,’ featuring the famous tank engine. In fact, this book has proved so popular that my original copy wore out and I had to buy a new one!

8) A homemade book:

Children love stories that feature themselves or people that they know. You can buy books that will add a child’s name into the story but making you own books is easier, cheaper and more effective. Making your own books for or with children really gives them ownership over their special book.  Your homemade books do not need to be fancy. For very young children a short book with some photos of themselves and their family members to look at is lovely. Cover some of the photos with flaps over the top to lift to make the book interactive. Make sure you have a few pages to turn so that children can learn about how a book works and your efforts are sure to be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I have not included number books on this list for a particular reason. I am certainly not saying to share number books with young children, but this is an essentials list. Very young children who do not even have a concept of what a number is are not ready to count so books featuring things to count in sequence are not necessarily the best way to introduce very young children to number. Instead make sure to have books which have number words in them such as nursery rhymes with numbers in them. When children are a little older or more developed and understand that you can count things then your numbers books will be much more useful.

Over to you:

I would love to know what your favourite books are to share with your very youngest children. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Do you want more support and ideas for working with your very youngest children?

I noticed that there isn’t as much support or training available for childminders about very young children under the age of two. This is why I introduced a special section in the Childminding Best Practice Club monthly toolkits which is dedicated specifically to this age group. In it you will find loads of ideas to try out with your very littlest ones.

The toolkits also contain a wealth of other ideas and resources including CPD ideas, inspection support and a themed section every month containing things like crafts, invitations to play ideas, resources and colouring sheets. Best Practice Club members also receive a useful. ‘New Members Welcome Pack,’ containing lots of other resources and a 25% discount off other Kids To Go products.

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