Nursery Curriculum

In Nursery, pupils learn through a nurturing, play-based, thematic approach, utilising a range of interesting and creative teaching methods. Warm, trusting relationships with highly qualified, caring adults are quickly established to support and promote each child’s confidence, compassion, creativity, curiosity, courage and commitment to learning.

Our Nursery is set up to be a stimulating and challenging environment, with open-ended natural resources, valuing exploration and play. The children have the freedom to investigate, discover, imagine, and to develop their knowledge, skills and understanding through high quality adult-led experiences and activities specifically set up to support swift progression in learning. The curriculum in our Nursery is based around the seven areas of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS):

• Communication and Language

• Literacy

• Mathematics

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development

• Physical Development

• Understanding the World

• Expressive Arts and Design

Our language-rich environment promotes and develops our students’ early phonics and pre-reading skills. These skills are introduced to students through fun activities that help them ‘tune into’, remember and talk about sounds for example the sounds which make up the word ‘cat’ are ‘c-a-t’. Children need to ‘hear’ the individual sounds in order that they can blend them when spelling words in Reception and beyond. Early number concepts are developed through subitising (seeing 3 on a dice and immediately recognising the pattern that makes 3) and through counting. 

In Nursery, children are taught numerical patterns, which builds a deep understanding of number and number relationships, developing pupils’ fluency, reasoning and problem-solving. Children will be taught to recognise numbers and to count items, for example, counting 5 toy dinosaurs on a table by touching 1 at a time and saying the number out loud.

You have two options regarding the length of your child's Nursery Day; finishing at 12:15 or 14:25. The focus of the Full Day afternoon sessions continues to be learning through fun and play! Staying for a Full Day enables your child to progress at a faster rate as they receive high quality teaching and learning for longer. Our Nursery fees are based on the half day attendance, however should you wish for your child to attend the full day, there is an additional fee per term.

If you wish to register your child for the full day attendance, we must have your explicit permission to keep your child on for the full day, for insurance purposes, and we require an acknowledgement from you that you agree for them to attend for the duration of this term. Please complete this Google Form if you wish your child to participate in the full Nursery day: Nursery Full Day Form.

Children who stay for the Full Day will be in our Nursery learning environment (with our Nursery staff), who will support them as they explore different learning areas within the indoor and outdoor Nursery learning environments. We will be exploring the Nursery playground area and beyond, accessing a range of activities, including arts, music, dance, role play and physical movement; all of which facilitate further learning from the Half Day sessions.