Food for spring!
Our menus for spring are here! We've been working over the past few months to put together some delicious new recipes for the children at Snapdragons to enjoy through the new season and we've got some tasty treats on there, including chicken pasta, a vegetarian cottage pie and some homemade sausage rolls!
Time to start wishing you were coming to nursery for lunch yourselves... 🤤
International Women's Day 2018
On International Women's Day 2018 we'd like to take the opportunity to thank the wonderful women who work in childcare, both at Snapdragons and across the sector.
Your dedication and passion are helping to shape the next generation, making them secure, resilient, inquisitive, strong and kind; helping them to be happy, fulfilled and resourceful; helping them to be ready to learn and to seize life's opportunities.
We respect you for choosing a career that demands hard work, passion, patience, energy, creativity, empathy, sensitivity and love. We respect you for enabling parents to return to work knowing that their children are cared for and educated in a loving environment.
Your hard work means that doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists, retailers, farmers, gardeners and entrepreneurs can contribute to our economy. You should be very proud. We are certainly proud of you!
Twenty Incredible Years of Childcare
We love celebrating birthdays at Snapdragons, in fact, we love them so much that everyone in our team has an extra day off on their birthdays to show them how much we appreciate them. Now we're gearing up for a birthday that's really special to all of us. It's ours!
Twenty years ago, Snapdragons Nurseries Ltd was born in a farmhouse in Atworth, Wiltshire, and we haven't looked back. Since January 1998, Snapdragons has grown steadily from one small village nursery to a thriving family of eight in Wiltshire, Bath and Bristol. Back in 1998, there were just two children in attendance on the opening day and now there are over 1,100 children attending a Snapdragons nursery every week and many thousands more who have been part of our family over the last twenty years.
What else have we achieved in all those years? Well, we've gained multiple Outstanding Ofsteds and hold national nursery industry awards from Nursery World and Nursery Management Today; we've achieved the highest gold standard Food For Life Served Here award from the Soil Association; we're part of the Pickwick Learning Teaching Alliance. We've trained apprentices, under-graduates and graduates, encouraging and supporting them to further their careers. We've hosted students from all our local colleges and universities and given placements to trainee Norland Nannies from Bath and Japan. Our teams have attended hundreds of training courses to ensure their knowledge is current and relevant: First Aid, Food Safety, Safeguarding, Leadership and Management, Forest School and Nutrition as well as every aspect of child development and early years education. We've built two purpose-built nurseries and converted a farmhouse, a girls' school, a language school, a veterinary college, a church and a conference centre into Snapdragons Nurseries. We still employ five of our original staff, all now holding senior management roles and sharing their expertise.
So, although it's only Snapdragons Atworth who can genuinely claim the 20-year party hat, everyone, from our wonderful team of employees, through our unique and incredible nursery children, to their supportive (and discerning!) parents, can all celebrate the years of knowledge and experience that have helped to make us, we think, a very special family of nurseries. Happy birthday to us!
Food for winter
We've been settling back into nursery the past few days and putting the final touches on our winter menus that will be starting from next week. Everyone needs something to keep their belly warm on these cold days, so we've introduced some dishes to do just that, like 'macaroni cheese' and 'chicken and vegetable soup'. Mmmm, we can almost taste them already. In fact, you can find the recipe for the soup in the latest issue of the Snapdragons Magazine, so you don't even have to think about what it tastes like - you can try it yourself!
These menus will run for the next few months, before we finally head into spring again at the end of March. Until then, snuggle up and know your children are warm at nursery with these tasty menus this winter.
Menu 1 - w/c January 8th, February 5th, March 5th
Menu 2 - w/c January 15th, February 12th, March 12th
Menu 3 - w/c January 22nd, February 19th, March 19th
Menu 4 - w/c January 29th, February 26th, March 26th