Embracing Hygge at The Flower Cottage this Autumn Season 🍁

Embracing Hygge at The Flower Cottage this Autumn season 🍁

Hygge in the Early Years member Caitlin, from The Flower Cottage Childminding has recently given her setting a wonderful autumn makeover. Giving us all the Autumn feels! We couldn't help but fall in love as it is so inspiring.

We asked Caitlin if she would share with us some of the hygge activities in her setting:

Noticing changes as we transition from Summer to Autumn, observing the colours transitioning, watching the leaves fall and finding hidden treasures outdoors that can be brought into our indoor play 🍂

Melting pumpkin spice wax melts in our burner on a morning and simply enjoying a lovely storybook as a group, cuddled in blankets and cosy jumpers.

Enjoying slow learning in our play spaces filled with twinkle lights, flickering candles and nooks of light from lamps, following the child’s lead but always being there on hand in time of need.

Enabling and encouraging children to reach their next hurdle and providing the most simplest but effective activities to support this.

Baking cinnamon buns and exploring scented dough. The children love adding lots of our collected nature treasures to the dough. We made slow cooker dough recently, adding cinnamon spice - would you like to know more?!

Our dough station is a play space that is accessible 24/7. I swap out the resources on the dough station from time to time or I just let the children self-select what they would like to add or use.

Embracing and appreciating nature in our outdoor space and on walks. Who doesn’t love this time of year. I know I do and our children do too😍✨💫

Let’s talk about role-play and small world at The Flower Cottage

I have such a small group of children and it is evident when interests are changing, their development is evolving and when it is relevant for me to step in as an Early Years Educator, this can be during play or in relation to the environment. I always reflect on what is working but what could also be improved to benefit the children.

It is so important to give children the opportunity to explore, be curious and creative. Play is fundamental for a child’s happiness along with being in a safe and secure environment. Things are often tidied away in draws and resources that children may want to use are often put up high on counters/storage units that they simply cannot reach. ‘Toy boxes’ tend to be full to the brim and you will often find they just tip it all out and walk away, this is because a child can actually become overwhelmed by this as there is just simply ‘too much’ going on.

You may have seen on my socials that I’ve removed the typical dolls house, doctors station / tool bench etc and replaced them with cable reels as our base. Underneath in smaller baskets the children can help themselves to these resources that you might find with the above (Already pre-built set-ups) and they can choose what and where they would like to explore these items, whether that be on the reels provided, or elsewhere.

Rather than just having a designated play space where the children ‘should’ play with the toolbox and ‘should’ play at the doctors surgery.

I have incorporated a lot of real items into our play, building children’s knowledge that items can break and that we do need to take care of what we play and explore with.

HOWEVER! I have still created experiences for small world which the children absolutely love and thrive off, using our open-ended and adaptable house, peg dolls, multicultural resources and then of course, our beloved plastic resources that are used every single day such as our Barbies, animals etc!

It’s all about balance and with our new term approaching, change is often healthy.

And finally, some inspiration from our outdoor space:

With thanks to Caitlin from The Flower Cottage Childminding for this wonderfully inspiring tour of your beautiful hygge setting. You can follow Caitlin over on her social media channels on Facebook and Instagram too.

For more information on our life changing Hygge programme please click here

Find out more about the Hygge in the Early Years Accreditation here.