How We Began

Activities

We aim to provide a well balanced and stimulating curriculum in line with the Birth to 3 guidelines, 3-5 curriculum and a Curriculum for excellence, and to assess and evaluate each children’s progress on a regular basis. We desire to provide children with Active Learning experiences. We support the children in providing for spontaneous play, planned and purposeful play, investigating and exploring opportunities, event and life experiences and focused learning and teaching.

Activities Activities

Emotional Personal and Social Development
Children are offered a wide variety of activities to help develop confidence and self esteem. These will include taking part in large and small groups as well as opportunities to play alone and with peers. Children are introduced to rules and decision making and take part in various cultural and religious celebrations.

Communication and Language
Books and poetry (fiction and non fiction) are available all the time in the story corner, which are either used in group or on a one to one basis and in conjunction with displays. These develop the children’s communication and language skills by introduction them to new vocabulary, counting, early literacy and knowledge of the world. Story sacks are also used which allow children to use props and games to bring the story to life.

The children have the opportunity weekly to participate in French classes.

Expressive and Aesthetic
The children are given various opportunities to express themselves through art activities, role play, musical activities and dance. We hold a weekly dance class for the children and all are given the opportunity to participate. Children are able to use a wide variety of musical instruments to express themselves both during group play and free play.

Art activities are now becoming more complex with this age group in order to enhance their skills and co-ordination. We introduce the children to fine brushes, proper pencils, stencils, scissors and various other equipment and resources. The children are given more scope to explore these activities as they are more confident and independent. Many of these activities are structured to follow topics and children’s interests. Drama and Role play now reflect the fact the children are now more independent at dressing and enjoy this type of play and take on specific roles, ie policeman, fireman. We encourage good language skills in the area and the children have the opportunity to lead play and be expressive.

Knowledge and Understanding of the World
Children are encouraged to use their 5 senses throughout their time at Nursery. We bake with the children , use the sorting table to practise early math skills and involve the children in focused sand and water activities. Our children start to explore further concepts and maths skills such as mass, volume, weight, dry and wet, building models, adding colours to water and floats. Numbers, colours and shapes are highly visible throughout the Nursery to assist children in their learning.

Physical Development and Movement
Children take part in a variety of physical activities daily. Ball games, bikes, scooters, parachute play, assault courses and balancing activities are delivered either outside in our purpose built play area or where possible indoors. Children are given the opportunity to develop their fine motor skills.

We introduce construction toys and games which are more fine and difficult to encourage the children to problem solve and make decisions. Equipment such as Lego, Meccano and popoids are used along with diagrams to enable children to construct models. This also builds on motor skills and concentration.

Observations and Profiling
A profile is prepared for each child at the Nursery. Our staff observe the children at various times to enable us to keep a record of the child’s skills and stages of development. This also enables our staff to see if there is an area of skill which a child needs more assistance or stimulation with and to give time to develop on this. The profile follows the child through the nursery years and can be taken onto school. Your child will also help staff with an “All about Me” record which is available for your child to look at during their time at Nursery. This typically includes family photos, drawings and art work.