Welcome to Nursery!

It is our intent to provide a happy, safe, stimulating and nurturing environment where children can become confident, independent and resilient learners. Children are encouraged to make choices and to develop confidence in themselves as creators, investigators and thinkers. Through planned experiences and high-quality interactions, it is our intent to promote the importance of celebrating the diversity of life and respect for all, within the local environment and wider world.

To encourage interest and challenge, we implement this through a carefully planned curriculum which reflects the interests of the children and ensures progression and continuity of skills in all seven areas of learning.

The Prime Areas

Communication and Language where children learn about listening, attention, understanding and speaking.

Physical Development where the focus is upon developing gross and fine motor skills.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development where children gain confidence and self-awareness, the ability to manage their feelings and behaviour and learn about building effective relationships with others.

The Specific Areas

Literacy where children will develop their comprehension, word reading and writing skills.

Mathematics where children will develop their understanding of number and numerical patterns.

Understanding the World within children will explore the past and present, people, culture and communities and the natural world.

Expressive arts and design where children will experiment with creating with materials and being imaginative and expressive.

Each child is unique, learns and experiences things in different ways. We value the diversity of each and every child in our care and celebrate their differences and individual characters. A child’s individual learning characteristic will determine the way they respond to both the teaching and learning taking place in the environment. During their time in our EYFS, we will be looking out for not just ‘what’ a child learns but ‘how’ they learn too. This is referred to as the ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning.’

Playing and exploring – where children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’.

Active learning – where children concentrate, keep on trying if they find things difficult and enjoy achievements.

Creating and thinking critically – where children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas and develop strategies for doing things.

We teach children individually, in small groups and as whole cohorts. Through a combination of adult led and continuous provision opportunities, activities are planned to encourage children to develop their learning independently through exploration and challenge. The characteristics of effective learning and the prime areas of learning contribute to the success of our children. They encourage the children to be independent, reflective and sociable. These areas also enable the children to apply their knowledge and skills into other areas of their learning and achieve the best that they can. The children are assessed through child-focused observations and verbal interactions. This information informs our planning for whole class and individual next steps in learning.

The impact of our curriculum is measured by outcomes year on year. We strive to ensure that our children’s attainment in the prime and specific areas of learning are at least in line with age-related expectations and that children make good progress from their unique starting points. We work to ensure our children develop into positive learners, who are excited by new challenges. We strive to ensure that our children leave our EYFS ready to move with confidence into KS1 and be academically, physically, socially and morally prepared for their future in education, Britain and the wider world.

 

Mrs Duxbury (Teacher and Early Years Leader) works full time in the EYFS unit and she is the key worker for all children in their Reception year at school. Mrs Harbert (teacher) is the key worker for all nursery age children. A key worker is your link person between home and school. Mrs Mitchell (Early years Practitioner) and Mrs Fowler (Teaching assistant) work full time with all EYFS, both Reception and Nursery, children. All our EYFS staff work together to help to ensure that every child's care is tailored to meet their individual needs so that they can make good progress and flourish.

Highlight of the week 9/12/24: Wow! Well done Acorns and Saplings, your performance of ‘Whoops-a-Daisy Angel’ was fantastic! We are so super proud of all of you. You have all worked so hard on learning the words for all the songs of this special nativity play. You sang them all beautifully! You all showed such courage and joy acting, dancing and saying your words on the big stage. You are all superstars!

         

Highlight of the week 25/11/24: Last week, we had a very busy week packed full of birthdays! We all really enjoyed listening to the story about Spot at his party playing 'hide and seek' and we had lots of fun playing our own games of 'hide and seek'. We made party hats and playdough cupcakes; we found the right amount of candles to match numbers, and we had a party to celebrate Peaches and Parker Bears' birthdays.

            

Highlight of the week 11/11/24: We have enjoyed listening to the story of 'Simon Sock' this week as part of Anti-bullying Week. We had fun wearing odd socks to school on Tuesday and made our very own 'odd' sock puppet, as well as designing a pair of odd socks using felt tips.

      

Highlight of the week 21/10/24: What an amazing start Acorns have had to their very first term at school. They have all been superstars! This week we have been thinking about Autumn as the leaves are changing colour and falling from the trees. We have been busy making beautiful leaf rubbings in Autumnal colours as well as creating Autumn trees.

         

Highlight of the week 07/10/24: This week Acorns have been reading 'The Colour Monster' and thinking about feelings. We have talked about different feelings and how they make us feel. We have expressed our feelings through art and created our very own colour monsters with a range of different media. And of course, we have all displayed our feelings of excitement playing on our new climbing frame that has been installed this week.

            

Highlight of the week 23/09/24: This week we have been enjoying sharing the book 'Owl Babies'. We have acted out the story using our family of owls, thought about the repeated phrase in the story and made our very own owls using paper cups.

          

Highlight of the week 09/09/24: We have had a wonderful start to the school year in Acorns. We have been doing lots of exploring and playing with different toys inside the classroom and outside in the EYFS Garden, as well as getting to know each other.