We have committed the Nursery to the Healthy and Sustainable Pre-school National Award Scheme via Public health Wales and the Welsh Assembly Government.

We look forward to the process and to ensuring we are always doing the absolute best for our wonderful children here at Siwgr Plwm. The award runs over 4 years with the first year centering on Nutrition and Oral Health. We shall be looking at the Nursery as a whole also to ensure all standards are at their highest and incorporating more healthy activities into the daily education planning.

Update October 2012: Nutrition and Oral Health. This spring and summer we have grown our own vegatables and created a compost area to recycle our orgarnic waste back into the soil. In addition to the 'Veg', the children were given the opportunity to plant and pot some flowers, these looked lovely in the pots and the children really enjoyed watering and watching them grow. Throughout the summer the children harvested the veg and Gail our Cook, prepared and used it as part of our meals. Some of the meals were beef and courgette cassarole, vegatable curry and ham salad with new potatoes. On the whole, the weather was not great at all as we had very little sunshine and too much rain, which resulted in the tomatoes being quite disappointing as they were small and fairly bland. Next season we intend to grow them under cover in a small poly-tunnel.

In line with the pre-school scheme the children have concentrated on learning to wash their hands appropriately before meals and after using the toilet. We have had several fruit and veg tasting sessions sampling the delightful flavours of: grapefruit, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, melon, broccoli, sweet peppers, figs, dates, pineapple and many more. The results showed that the most popular were grapes and sweet peppers and most did not like figs, dates were about half and half.

Oral health is vitally important and forms the next part of our current module. We believe that children enjoy learning and the best way to encourage oral health is to incorporate it into our lifestyle; brushing regularly, especially after sweet sticky foods, and to reduce or stop consuming sweet and fizzy drinks.

We will continue to keep you informed via this page so please keep checking for next update May 2013.