🍼🤔 When is Baby Ready for Weaning? 🤔🍼

Lots of parents wonder when and how to start introducing solid foods - with so much conflicting advice available it can be very confusing. 🫣🥕🍖

There are 3 clear signs, which, when they appear together from around 6 months of age, show that your baby is ready for their first solid foods, alongside breast milk or first infant formula. 🍼💕

Signs that your baby may be ready to start weaning:

✅ Stay in a sitting position, holding their head steady
✅ Coordinate their eyes, hands and mouth so they can look at their food, pick it up and put it in their mouth
✅ Swallow food (rather than spit it back out)

Behaviours that can be mistaken for signs of being ready:

❌ Chewing fists
❌ Wanting extra milk feeds
❌ Waking up in the night (more than usual)

These fist-chewing, wanting extra feeds and waking up in the night are normal baby behaviours and not necessarily a sign of hunger or being ready to start solid food.

Starting solid foods will not make your baby any more likely to sleep through the night. Sometimes a little extra milk will help until they are ready for food. 🍼

If your baby was born prematurely, ask your health visitor or GP for advice on when to start weaning.

Here's a great quiz to help you decide whether your baby may be ready for weaning: www.nhs.uk/start-for-life/baby/weaning/ready-or-not-weaning-quiz/

For more expert weaning advice and support, search Start4Life. We're also always available for a chat or advice! ❤️

🍓🌷 Learning About Plants at Swineshead! 🌷🍓

At our Swineshead nursery, the children really enjoy learning about different plants and flowers, and one of our favourite ways to get stuck into this is by looking after our nursery garden! 🌸🌷🪻

As our herb garden has been such a success in our main garden, we decided to also plant some thyme, coriander and mint in our smaller garden. 🏡🌿👩‍🌾

The children each had a plant to explore. They touched the leaves and shared what they felt like:

💬 “It feels comfy!” ☁️
💬 “It feels funny!” 😆

The children then smelled their plants:

💬 “It smells like strawberries!” 🍓
💬 “It smells minty!” 🌿

Next, the children enjoyed digging their own holes in the big plant pot, ready to plant. They popped their plants into the holes and carefully covered the roots with soil. Some children asked a friend to help, while others got stuck right in! 🪴🪏👩‍🌾

Finally, the children paired up to water the plants and made sure they were placed in the sunshine to help them grow. 🌞🌱

This activity supported the children’s understanding of the world as they explored how to care for living things and what plants need to grow. 🌍🌱💦

To see more photos from our Swineshead nursery, have a look at our Swineshead albums under the photos tab.

Mealtimes can look very different for every child 🍎🥦 - some are adventurous eaters, while others find food a little trickier. For some children, this can be more than just “fussy eating” and may be linked to ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder).

👀 Signs of ARFID can include:

Eating a very limited range of foods 🍞🧀🍝
Strong fears or distress around trying new foods 😟
Sensory overwhelm from tastes, textures or smells 👃
Worries about choking or becoming unwell after eating 🫣

Unlike “picky eating,” ARFID isn’t a choice - it’s a disorder that can affect nutrition, growth, and emotional wellbeing. Children with ARFID aren’t being “difficult,” and parents aren’t to blame. ❤️ What really helps is patience, understanding and support.

🤝 We’re always here if you’d like to talk about your child’s eating patterns, diet or mealtimes at nursery. Together we can work to create a safe, supportive environment where children feel confident to explore food at their own pace. 🌈✨

For more information and support, visit: www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/get-information-and-support/about-eating-disorders/types/arfid/

🍓🍯 Fruity Flapjack Fun at Alford! 🍯🍓

Today in the Toddler Room, the children had a wonderful time making some delicious fruity flapjacks! 🧑‍🍳🫐🍓

They loved turning into little chefs for the afternoon, taking turns to pour and chop the ingredients 🥣🍌 (with a little taste test along the way! 😋).

Everyone joined in to ‘mix, mix, mix’ the mixture, copying the adults and having lots of fun. 🎶

This activity was a lovely way to encourage turn-taking and patience ⏳,
as well as supporting the children’s gross motor skills 💪, literacy skills 📚, and sharing with friends 🤝.

To see more photos from our Alford nursery, have a look at our Alford albums under the photos tab.

🍝🪱 Spaghetti Worm Play at Boston! 🪱🍝

The children in the Preschool Room at our Boston nursery have been fascinated by all things wiggly lately - especially worms! 🐛🪱🐍

To build on this interest, we created our very own spaghetti wormery. We cooked up some spaghetti and dyed it red to look like worms, then hid them beneath a layer of sand. 🏝️❤️

Using tweezers, the children carefully searched through the sand to find the ‘worms’ and popped them in the pot in the centre of the tray. 🪱💕

The children have absolutely loved this sensory experience and have spent all week diving back in to find more worms! A lovely way to combine fine motor development with imaginative, curiosity-led play. 🥰🪱💭

To see more photos from our Boston nursery, have a look at our Boston albums under the photos tab.

🌸 Passionfruit Play-Dough & Flower Fun at Swineshead! 🌸

At our Swineshead nursery, the children in our Preschool Room have had a great time making their own pink, passionfruit-scented play-dough! They used a variety of tools and cutters to get creative, building all sorts of imaginative shapes and designs 🍓✂️🎨

To extend the play, we added real flowers, sparking lots of discussions about the different parts of a flower and what each part does! This led us to explore some of our flower books, where we learned about how seeds spread in lots of different ways and how new flowers grow 🌱📚

The children were fascinated by the shapes of the petals, recognising lots of oval shapes and describing them as ‘squashed circles’! 🔍🧠

Using their play-dough and flowers, the children created some fantastic shapes and structures - a lovely example of creativity, curiosity, and early learning! 👏🌈✨

To see more photos from our Swineshead nursery, have a look at our Swineshead albums under the photos tab.