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Lavender is a versatile herb with numerous properties beneficial to health, wellness, and everyday life. Its calming aroma, therapeutic benefits, culinary uses, and role in personal care and household products make it a valuable and widely appreciated plant.

Lavender can be grown from seed and is a great sensory ingredient to explore. It attracts pollinators like bees and butterflies, making it a beneficial plant for your garden. Add it to playdough, potions, make lavender perfume or dry it and add sachets to your room indoors to create a beautiful calming scent. Lavender oil has antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties, making it useful for treating minor burns, insect bites, and skin irritations. You can also use it in cooking and natural cleaning products. Lavender has a calming effect, relaxing you, aiding sleep and reducing stress and anxiety.

We’ve just got back from a wonderful few days in Sweden. We stayed at a couple of different places; a treehouse on a farm called @traktforesthotel and a water chalet on a lake at a Swedish vineyard. 

We flew Manchester to Gothenburg and then hired a Volvo. 

We took a two hourish drive into the countryside to stay at Trakt Forest Hotel. Along the way we passed so many roadside wildflowers. In particular the foxgloves lining the roads along with the Cow Parsley was very pretty! 

When we arrived at the Trakt Forest Hotel we checked into one of five tree houses built on the farm. These were so peaceful up in the forest and felt very private and not overlooked. There were a number of different experiences you could tag onto your stay. We added the outdoor sauna to ours. You could kayak at a local lake or take a forest bath. They all sounded wonderful but unfortunately time didn’t allow us to do all. 

Our treehouse was beautifully designed and made. With all the interiors created b...

Encouraging children to get outdoors in nature with a fun activity that will keep them engaged.

Create a nature Journal with your children to help them have a better understanding of nature and to encourage them to ask questions about the nature that surrounds them.

Go on a walk to the park, forest, pond, stream, woodland, beach. Use your journal to make notes and draw what you find most interesting. Write down what you see and hear, stick special leaves and flowers that you find in. Draw around leaves and create leaf and bark rubbings on the pages.

Take some watercolours and crayons to use - what colours can you see?  Take this journal with you over the summer holidays to make a record of the adventures you have been on and the nature that you have found. Take it to the beach and draw shells, fish and seabirds. Take it to the pond and sketch the tadpoles, frogs and ducks. Stick any feathers that you find into your journal. Stick in a photo of you collecting natural treasures or j...

A time of coming together with a slower approach

Midsummer in Sweden

Midsummer comes on the 21st June and this is a time when it feels as though the sun never sets. In fact in northern parts of Scandinavia it doesn't! 

In the 1500's this time of year was seen as a magical time where fertility levels were high. This was celebrated by the Swedes decorating the outside of their homes and farms with green foliage.

As we moved into the industrial period mill workers would come together at Midsummer for a wonderful feast of pickled herring.

More recent traditions have seen the making of floral crowns from the wildflowers and maypole dancing in the local area. 

On Midsummer Day in Sweden many of these traditions remain. It's also very much a time of coming together with family and friends over delicious meals. Pickled herring is still a feature on the midsummer menu along with a grilled dish of salmon or spare ribs. 

The evenings are spent gathered around a bonfire, enchanted by the ...

Here are 6 simple and engaging daisy-themed activities for children:

1. Daisy Chains

Collect fresh daisies with long stems. Make a small slit near the base of each stem using your fingernail then thread the next daisy’s stem through the slit and repeat to create a chain.

2. Daisy Painting

Pour a small amount of white, yellow and green paint. Show children how to dip their thumbs in white paint and press them onto paper to create daisy petals. Use a fingertip dipped in yellow paint to make the center of each daisy. Add stalks with green.

3. Daisy Planting

Plant some seeds and look after them until they grow. Ox Eye daisies are a lovely alternative as they are much bigger.

4. Daisy Mud Pies in the Mud Kitchen

Create mud pies and buns in the mud kitchen and decorate with daisies! You could make a daisy potion.

5. Daisy Counting Game

Simply count your daisies on a ten frame or in a line. How many can you count?

6. Daisy Playdough

Add Daisies to your playdough station.

 ...

The beautiful white, frothy elderflowers tend to bloom in late May, turning to elderberries in late August. Prime picking time is in the morning, on a sunny day (before insects have taken the pollen). Once regarded as one of the most magically powerful of trees, elder is a forager's favourite and its flowers are the scent of summer. The flowers and berries are the only edible part of the Elder Tree. They are mildly toxic and have an unpleasant taste when raw. Cooking destroys the toxic chemicals.

Here are a few activities to explore:

1. Make delicious elderflower cordial or gin!
2. Add them to cakes or biscuits 
3. Try them deep-fried to make tasty elderflower fritters 
4. Make elderflower jam
5. Add them to homemade Playdough 
6. Add them to your mud kitchen and potions
7. Paint Elderflowers using a cotton bud to create a spray of white flowers - or splatter the paint to see what effect you get.

Find out more about Hygge in the Early Years here.

Ah the fields are bright and yellow with the delight of buttercups! I have such fond childhood memories of spending time in the uncut fields near my house. 

Whilst the buttercups are appealing, please take care as they are toxic if eaten and it's always best to handle with garden gloves on to reduce the risk of skin irritation. 

Here are some simple Buttercup Activity Ideas that you can enjoy over the next few weeks....

1. Play hide and seek in the long swishy grass and buttercups

2. Choose a spot to just sit and observe them. Who visits them? How do they smell? Notice their shiny and reflective petals. How do you feel when you sit amongst these? Why not take a picnic?

3. Run free through a field of buttercups. Feeling the buttercups across your hands as you run. 

You might be wondering where all the fancy resource set ups and invitations to play are here. Have we missed them out of this blog post?

No!

I often get asked ,'Am I not doing my job well if I don’t have lots of inv...

Young children love to be free and take off their clothes. Yet we can be so quick to cover them up, especially their feet! Children in the UK are often given shoes even before they can walk. 

Being barefoot is so beneficial and we feel so much of the world through our feet. A study in the journal 'Frontiers in Pediatrics' has shown that children who spend most of their time barefoot have increased motor skills and are better in jumping and balancing. 

Many teachers and forest school leaders here in the U.K share their experiences of children lacking in co-ordination and balance when moving around the uneven forest floor. 

When we spend time indoors we are greatly limiting the types of surfaces children learn to walk on and get used to moving around on. These are normally smooth and firm with no roughness or bumps.

When we take our shoes and socks off outdoors we are also connecting our bodies directly to nature which benefits our wellbeing too. Helping our mental health and bring...