Monday 20th Sept - British Food Fortnight - Vegetable Soup

On Monday a group of children walked to the Court's kitchen garden where they met up with the gardeners and went round to choose vegetables to make soup for tea. After a good look round they came back with a basket full of carrots, butternut squash, onions, leeks and potatoes.

Back at Grasshoppers the older nursery children cut up some of the vegetables, leaving the butternut squash , which was a bit harder, for the After school club children to prepare to make soup.

The children ate the soup for tea and it was delicious, so good that one of the team made it at home, but she said that hers wasn't quite as good , but then her veg were from the supermarket not straight out of the garden!!

Why not make some for yourself, here is what we did;

Carrot and butternut squash soup with honey

Ingredients

1oz butter

1 onion (peeled and chopped)
1 garlic clove (peeled and crushed)
6 carrots (peeled and chopped)
1 medium butternut squash (peeled, chopped and deseeded)

1 litre vegetable stock

1 crusty white roll

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp runny honey

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan on low heat, add the onion, garlic and carrot and cook for five minutes, until the onion is soft.
2. Add the potato and cook for a few more minutes.
3. Add the butternut squash and cook for a few more minutes.
4. Pour over the stock and bring to the boil, then simmer for twenty-five minutes.
5. Take off the heat, allow to cool puree using a blender
6. Cut the bread roll in half, cut each half into cubes, drizzle honey and olive oil over the cubes.
7. Bake in the oven until crispy.

We hope that you have access to fresh vegetable too so that you can taste it at its best!

Look what else we've grown!

Over the Summer, we grew a row of sunflowers.

We have watered them and watched them grow very closely - one of them had more than one flower!

After he went along the line carefully counting the flowers, one of the children suggested we number them. Doing just that has opened up all sorts of other opportunities for maths; comparing them and guessing which would grow the tallest.

They have finished flowering now, so we are drying out the flowerheads to plant some of the seeds next year and to feed the birds through the winter.

We also planted some gerberas in wellington boots to brighten up the entrance. We have looed after them and learned what our flowers needed to grow. The gerberas have also reached the end of their growing season, but as we got so many comments about our lovely wellies we are going to replant them, they may become a seaonal feature!

Celebrating British Food Fortnight - 18th September - 3rd October

At Grasshoppers we have lots of plans for Britsh Food Fortnight.

We have been growing our own vegetables, salad and herbs and we are going to be using them in our baking this week.
We are also going to be collecting veg from the Court garden and picking fruit from orchards in the village.

We have plans to enter a smoothie in the national competition - but our ideas and recipe are top secret!!

We hope to use some flour made from wheat harvested from Overbury Farm in our messy play activities and our stories and songs will be themed to help the children to learn more about where their food comes from.

We'd like to involve the families of the children in our activities, so if you have any fruit or vegetables that you have grown and would like to bring them in we'd love to use them in our activities.

Watch this space for photographs our British Food Fortnight fun!!

A Big Thank You!

We need to say a big thank you to all of you who religiously collected Sainsburys vouchers with your weekly shops. We have received our goodies and want to show you what fun the children are having with them.

We were able to get new resouces for both indoors and out.

We chose a breakfast and dinner set for our home corner as imaginative role play is such a firm favourite with all ages.

We also got some more gardening equipment to use in both the growing of our own vegetables and messy fun in the digging pit!!

Thanks again.

Combining Trip

On Wednesday, 18th August, we went on our rain-postponed trip to watch the harvesting. We had been planning to go the previous Wednesday but the children learned how reliant Farmer Jake is on fair weather!!

When we arrived at the field in the tractor and trailer we found that they had another problem - the combine had broken down!

This, however, didn't dampen the children's spirits at all. Locked safely into the trailer they were able to clamber about to watch the baler in one field and have a good look at the stationary combine.



In small groups we climbed down to have a closer look at the fields, the machinery and the crops. We then climbed on the bales to watch the baler continuing it's work up and down the field (all still at a safe distance!).


Back at nursery we used grain and barley we had gathered to make our harvest collages.

Bug Hotel

Have you seen our fabulous bug hotel at the bottom of the car park?

We have become very interested in the insects we find in the nursery garden, in our meadow area, orchard and out and about at Forest School and on our walks. The children have been using magnifying glasses and reference books to find out more about them.

We found several examples of ideas for building insect hotels to provide the right habitats to increase the number of beneficial insects in the garden, and decided to build our own. Perhaps you would like to make one too!

Here is how we made ours.

• We took a postcard to 'Buider Mark' at the estate yard to ask for any old palettes, wood, bricks and pipes he could spare.
  
• We took a postcard to 'Farmer Jake' asking if we could collect wool and straw from the farm
• We collected pine cones and sticks on our walks
  
• When we had assembled everything the children used wooden trolleys to transport everything to the area chosen to build our hotel (between the buddleias - good for butterflies!
  
• The children had good fun positioning all of the materials, as you can see from the pictures.

We are doing regular checks on the bug hotel, but there are still some vacancies so please tell any insects you know!!

Street Market 10th July

Last Saturday the Grasshoppers' team ran 'Splat-the-rat!' and Lucky Dip games and sold some of the children's brownies at the annual Overbury Street Market.

It was great to have lots of the nursery and 'after school club' children there winning some of our prizes and also to meet again some of the children soon to be joining us at Grasshoppers.

We hope to make children's activities such as these Grasshoppers' regular contribution to this village event.

Overbury Street Market - 10th July

Next Saturday at the Steert Market in Overbury, Overbury Grasshoppers are running a number of stalls. We will have some activities especially for the children - including a Lucky Dip, 'Splat-the-rat!' and we will be selling some of the children's brownies, which have been our most popoular recipe. Come and find us in the open garden - if the weather is fine!!

Thursday 17th June – Shearing Trip

On Thursday morning a group of children, staff, parents

and grandparents rode in our trusted tractor and trailer

to the sheep sheds at Park Farm.

There we watched the two shearers at work. The process fascinated the children.

Todd, the shepherd showed us some shears up close and one of the fleeces.

Back at nursery, unsurprisingly, the first choice of song at grouptime was; ‘Baa, baa black sheep’. The older children pointed out that we hadn’t seen any black sheep, so they suggested two new versions; ‘Baa, baa black-faced sheep’ and ‘Baa, baa black-legged sheep’ instead!With all Overbury farm hands hard at work, we did see several ‘bags full’!!

Maypole dancing 28th May

It could be us in a few years!!

So we had been watching the rehearsals closely through the fence for the last few weeks. Then on Friday we got to see the real thing!

On our walk through the village, knowing what we were going to see, one of our 2 year olds just kept repeating " I'm so excited!".

We were very proud of how well the nursery children sat as they watched out for the children they knew from breakfast and after-school club, clapping along with the rest of the audience,

they really seemed to enjoy it.

Thank you and congratulations to the Overbury School children and staff.