Our large playroom room has an open plan layout to maximise the space and resources available to the children. It also benefits from direct access to the outdoor play area allowing children to choose whether to play indoors or outdoors.

Our Staff

Our Two to Five’s Room is led by caring, qualified and experienced practitioners who have a good understanding of how children develop and learn between the ages of two and five years. They have a thorough knowledge of the requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage and appropriate ways of teaching young children. To ensure that we meet your child’s learning and development needs we differentiate the activities we offer and plan for each child individually.

A member of staff, designated as your child’s Key Person, will get to know you and your child. A close relationship between the Key Person and you ensures that your child’s individual needs are met, and their personal, social and emotional development and wellbeing is supported.

Our Routines

We ensure that we develop routines consistent with those that you have at home. We discuss with you your child’s personal care routines including toilet training or toileting, feeding and sleeping to ensure that we understand and respect your preferences and to provide as much continuity of care as possible.

Two to Five’s Room

Our Two to Five’s room is a warm and friendly space where your child can feel safe and secure and can play and have fun. There are spaces for children to sleep, spaces for quiet play as well as for more active play. Children are encouraged to explore our inspiring environment which is rich in opportunities for active learning and equipped with resources that motivate your child to investigate and explore. We structure our environments in a very particular way putting resources at children’s height enabling them to make choices about what they play with. We plan the equipment and resources carefully to meet the needs of each individual child and to support their learning and development. Children can become engrossed in activities and play on their own or collaboratively in small groups. Our environments are places where children can feel energised, stimulated, relaxed, comfortable and keen to learn.

We ensure that the environment is rich in resources that invite experimentation as two-year olds are keen to ‘do it myself’. Children begin to form early friendships and develop social skills with support from the Key Person. Sharing, however, is a new concept and so we ensure that there are sufficient resources for everyone as well as equipment that we can use to encourage co-operation.

Our Play-Based Curriculum

For our older children the curriculum ensures that children are given meaningful, interesting, practical play experiences that are going to allow them to become confident competent learners, who enjoy learning because it is fun. We combine child-initiated activities with direct teaching and adult led activities. We give children the opportunity to use all their developing skills to learn in a cross curricula way through play as they explore different activities and experiences including;

• Heuristic Materials – These are collections of everyday objects made of natural materials chosen to offer stimulus to different senses. They support your toddler’s tactile exploration and investigation of materials which are open ended. Your Toddler can manipulate objects in many ways; collecting, arranging, posting, transporting, stacking, knocking down, filling and pouring. These actions strengthen fine motor skills and give children opportunity to explore ‘schema’ or patterns of thinking.
• Investigation and Exploration – We provide resources to encourage your child to investigate and explore the world around them. We include opportunities to explore exciting things from nature and science to how things work and superheroes! Activities are designed to engage your child’s curiosity and develop their knowledge and understanding.
• Physical play – Children’s play is very active and physical, which is essential for development of their brains, heart, lungs, bones and bodies. It improves their movement and co-ordination and contributes to keeping a healthy body weight. Exercise improves their mood and self-esteem and helps them to learn. We ensure that they have lots of opportunities for physical play indoors and outdoors. They love to use gross motor skills to jump, sweep, push, throw, fill, lift, carry, dance and run.
• Creative activities – we provide lots of opportunities for creativity, investigation and exploration and to discover all about the world around them. Your child can experience different textures as they play with malleable materials such as playdough, clay and gloop; made of cornflour and water. Children enjoy painting, water and sand play, as well as sticking collages or making models with cereal boxes and other recycled materials. Children can explore the mathematics of shape and pattern and add mathematical language to their vocabulary. They can discover properties of materials in the world around them and learn to use tools such as pencils, paintbrushes and rolling pins independently.
• Construction area – small and large blocks provide the opportunity for your child to practice and develop their gross and fine motor movements. Together with small world people, vehicles and animals they allow children to create imaginary worlds and tell stories. Children can also work collaboratively to solve problems.
• Role Play – allows your child to act out things they experience in their own lives and to explore different roles. It encourages co-operation and creatively, supports communication, language and literacy skills and increases understanding of the world.
• Music, songs and rhymes – We talk and sing with children, encouraging them to join in action rhymes when they are ready. We listen to and often make music together. We encourage children to listen carefully to different sounds in the environment, made by instruments and in rhymes. We explore rhythm and beat and have fun whilst supporting important communication and language learning.
• Stories and books – We share cosy times snuggling up with picture and story books. Sometimes we also use puppets to bring a story to life. Children listen, concentrate and enjoy joining in with stories and rhymes. They look at books independently retelling favourite stories from pictures and beginning to recognise written words. They learn how books work and how to respect them.
• Mark Making – Resources for mark making including pencils, crayons, paper and notebooks are available in most areas of the nursery to allow children to include writing in their play – such as writing a shopping list in the role play area. There are also specific areas for mark making equipped with additional resources such as rulers and rubbers, calendars and forms to encourage children to begin to make marks, patterns, pictures and eventually number and letters.
• ICT – We support children in exploring technology. We help them to develop skills to use equipment such as remote-control toys, torches, and a range of ICT equipment.
• Letters and Sounds – We use the ‘Letters and Sounds’ phonics programme which is designed to teach children how the alphabet works for reading and spelling. The activities we use from Phase One of the programme concentrate on developing children’s speaking and listening skills, phonological awareness and oral blending and segmenting. We use these activities as part of our curriculum in order to link language with children’s physical and practical experiences. These activities pave the way for children to make a good start in reading and writing.
• Key Group Time – We have ‘small group times’ twice a day were each key group spends time with their Key Person focusing on a particular aspect of learning and development.

Learning and Development

The activities that we plan and provide are designed to support the prime areas of learning;

• Communication and Language
• Physical Development
• Personal Social and Emotional development

Activities for our 3 to 5-year olds also support the specific areas of learning and we begin to introduce them to our two-year-olds. The specific areas of learning are;

• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding of the World
• Expressive Arts and Design

We want children to be successful and effective in their learning. When we plan activities for children we, therefore, consider the different ways in which children learn and the characteristics that make them good at learning including actively learning through play and exploration and thinking critically and creatively about the things that they experience. These characteristics of effective learning provide a good foundation for learning throughout their lives.

Our Planning and Assessment

We differentiate our planning of activities and tailor it to meet your child’s individual needs taking into account their age and stage of development. This means that children who are gifted and those who have special needs, those who are the younger or older children in a group are all supported and enabled to make good progress in their learning. We make regular assessments of your child’s learning, development and progress including a progress check at two years old required by the EYFS.

Communicating with you

We share information about the activities and experiences your child has at nursery together with information about the progress they are making in their learning and development both face to face in informal conversations and in parents’ evenings and through our ‘Famly’ App.

School Readiness

In order to support children to make the transition to the next phase of their education with enthusiasm and confidence, we take a holistic view of school readiness. We develop children’s confidence and self-esteem, their social skills and independence, their self-care skills such as toileting and using cutlery, their communication skills, curiosity and their ability to learn.

You will have peace of mind knowing that your child is happy and actively engaged at nursery. That they are being well supported to make good progress in their learning and development. You will feel confident that when the time comes your child will be excited about and ready for school.

Our Garden

The outdoor environment is a very important part of our early year’s environment as it offers significantly different opportunities for play and exploration from those we provide indoors. We are fortunate to have direct access to secure outdoor play space from the two to five year olds room which means that children are able to use the garden at all times. We also take the babies and toddlers under two years old outdoors every day.

Play Activities

Our outdoor play area has a variety of surfaces including grass, tarmac and rubber which facilitate different play activities. We have a large climbing frame and wheeled toys for physical play. There is a mud kitchen for making mud pies and mixing potions, a water area for pouring and splashing. The children particularly enjoy removing their shoes and socks to play in the outdoor sandpit.

The children like to plant bulbs and sow seeds to grow flowers and vegetables. We go on minibeast hunts to find insects and spiders and wildlife in the garden before offering them a home in our ‘Bug Hotel’.

We have two covered areas in which we can provide further opportunities to enhance our outdoor play including equipment for mark making and for imaginative play. 

Space for Babies and Quiet Play

We also have a covered area outdoors for babies and children who are not yet mobile and need a safe quieter area to enjoy the fresh air.

Links with St Peter’s School

Our good relationship with St Peter’s school provides us with opportunities to play and take part in larger scale physical activities in their outdoor spaces during the holiday periods.

Walks and Outings

We make full use of the local area which has green spaces and the river close by. We sometimes take a picnic with us as well as paints, pens and pencils with paper to draw our surroundings.

We regularly go for walks to the park and to feed the ducks and visit places of interest in the local area such as the local library. The outdoor environment provides challenge and helps children to learn how to be safe and to be aware of others. We talk to children about road safety and staying safe near water.

The Special Nature of Outdoors

We know that outdoors is a special place for young children. It allows them to have real contact with the elements, seasons and the natural world. It offers them more freedom to be active, interactive, noisy and messy and to use all their senses. They can work on a large scale and use their whole bodies to do activities such as running, rolling, climbing, digging or building. Many young children prefer to be outdoors and find it easier to engage when opportunities for learning are offered outdoors.

Learning and Development

We understand the potential outdoors has for your child’s well-being and development and ensure that we make the best use of what it has to offer to effectively support learning.

Planning and Assessment

We make observations and assessments and plan for children’s learning outdoors just as we do indoors.

Communicating with you

We will share your child’s learning outdoors with you through photographs and observations on the Famly app and in discussions with you.