Little Barn Owls Day Nursery in Horsham

Tawny Owls 2-5's

The Tawny Owls 2-5's is homed in the beautiful Tythe Barn on Pondtail Road, adorned with numerous wooden beams and high vaulted ceilings. The wide open play space and huge garden provides a homely intimate nursery experience for our children who thrive on a balance of carefully planned playing and learning experiences, engaging workshop areas and closely bonded relationships with the staff and each other.

The nursery staff, education and practises are managed by Julie Catling, and overseen by Group Manager, Faye Brown and Owner Hayley Peacock. Read more about them and the rest of the team on the Meet the team page.

Walking the plank!

Inside-Out Policy

The Tawny Owls is also a free-flow nursery where our garden flows on from the main room through large open double doors. We have an all-weather electronic canopy, a huge grassed garden with state of the art outdoor play equipment and bikes, trikes, dens, slides, role play, arts and crafts, sand, water and sports equipment galore! The outdoors environment is a reflection of the inside workshop areas, to ensure that our Inside –Out policy continually provides as richer a learning experience as the indoors. It also means children choose to play inside and out all day long as their wonderful play journeys take place, and are not limited by rotating 'garden time'.
Our Inside- Out policy means all the stimulating resources, music, yoga, dance, language classes, explorations and planned play experiences that we provide inside, also take place outside in 3 main outdoor play areas: the free-flow garden, the securely-gated play park and the woodland areas all contained within in the nursery grounds (all of which we have in the grounds of both nurseries!) We have full all-in-one weather suits for all children so a bit of drizzle doesn't put us off!

Into the woods

Woodland trips in our grounds take place several times a week and can involve den building, forest cooking, woodland arts and crafts, wildlife exploration and woodland musical workshops to name a few. The children often bring back new treasures and turn them into their own artistic creations in our 'make and do area' to show mums and dads. We regularly track seasonal changes in the woodland with photos the children take, learning how the changes affect wildlife. This all came about from the Hedgehog they found in the garden!

We have a Forest School and visit Leachpool Woods every week where children aged 3+ do longer project work such as pond dipping, campfires and bivvy making and bird watching. Read more about this on The Great Outdoors page.

Trips and Visits

The Tawny Owls also enjoy a wide range of trips, visits and events to enrich their understanding of their local community and the roles of adults around them. Some include meeting and climbing in our local policemen's cars and finding out how their equipment works, meeting the postman, tasting chinese food at the local takeaway at Chinese New Year, and meeting a blind lady and her guide dog and learning about braille, to name a few. They have even been taught the art of Indian Head Massage by Jaiden's mum!

Trips to the local library, Horsham Park ,theatre and garden centres and more, are all a regular part of enhancing their knowledge and understanding of the world around them. We believe it's very important to contextualise their learning with real experiences and staff are encouraged to plan that bit further to make sure whatever the children show an interest in books and role play, is 'brought to life' by a hands on real experience.

All outings are carefully risk assessed by the Managers with staffing ratios increased and high visabilty vests worn by all children when out and about. Naturally, your permission is requested first.

Harriet Burrage Keyworker

Key Workers

Every child has a key working staff member who will get to know you and your child well and will be responsible for planning exciting, engaging and relevant play experiences for your child, as well as providing cuddles, comfort and whole family support. They will also be the person to observe, record and share key milestone developments with you in nursery, as well as the person you will share developments and progress about your child that you have experienced at home. We understand the level of trust you are putting allowing us to care for your child, which is why our keyworkers telephone and meet with all new mums and dads in a consultation before your child starts nursery, including a full run down of their favourite toys and activities to make sure we are completely prepared to give your child the best first day they could possibly have.

Heuristic play, activities and resources

We know that children are attracted to natural resources, and love to dress up and role play. We have a stimulating Heuristic area in the nursery where children can explore Treasure baskets and materials found around us in our environment. Tawny Owls love their Natural Exploration area, Garden Centre (where they grow and eat their own produce at meal times), role play shops, vets, supermarkets, doctors, travel centre, library, shoe shop.. you name it we've thought of it and have the resources to make it as real an experience as possible for them.

Playing messy is one of the best things about nursery. You may not have the time to cook blue spaghetti or fill a bath full of shaving foam, but we do! We believe the best way to help them learn is to let them fully experience that which they are drawn to, enjoy it with them, take note of what skills they have shown and how they play, then plan a continuing play experience just for them which keeps them engaged. And don't worry, we'll clean them down and hand them back to you fresh from a day's play. Read more about how we plan for learning on the Nursery Education page.

To keep everybody clean and safe, all toys and resources are cleaned everyday with safe antibacterial cleaner as part of our thorough hygiene practises..

Sleep routines

Children's home sleep routines are followed at Little Barn Owls with quiet sleep areas, cots, mats and cosy beds in each. Every child has their own sleep bag with a new blanket and sheet provided when they arrive, which is washed weekly by us.

Learning to sleep at nursery is a worry every parent shares. Please don't worry, our careful planning of quiet times means we are yet to meet a child (even very young babies) who won't sleep at our nursery, and all children are supervised at all times and recorded checks are carried out every ten minutes throughout their sleeping.

Our Parent-Nursery Association Chairwoman is Ciara Keane. Ciara is mum to Brody who attends Little Barn Owls full time. Brody has recently progressed from six months at Snowies 0-2's on to Tawny Owls 2-5's in September. She helps to run our PNA (Parent Nursery Association) events and parent social meet ups and provides us with continual feedback as a fee paying parent. Ciara's contact details are emailed to all new parents for you to discuss anything about nursery or to ask her for parent to parent first hand experience. She isn't an employee of the nursery, just a very supportive parent with good experiences to share.