Welcome to Little Treasures’ Nursery
Life at Little Treasures’ Nursery is full of fun and filled with exciting, playful and enjoyable learning opportunities. At the heart of our Early Years curriculum offer is the vision and Christian values of St Laurence’s C of E Primary School: “We strive to reflect the love of God, the love of life and the love of learning together in all we do.” From the very beginning, we work closely with parents and carers to ensure every child feels happy, safe, and supported. Our Nursery is led by experienced teachers who immerse our children in their learning whilst providing them with the Early Reading, Phonics and Mathematics skills to prepare them for their journey into school.
Starting Little Treasures’ Nursery
Here at Little Treasures’ Nursery, we offer a place to children the term after their third birthday. We take three intakes per academic year—at the start of the Autumn term, Spring term, and Summer term. Before each new intake begins, we hold stay and play sessions to give children and parents a chance to explore our Nursery environment and provision and to meet the teachers. We also carry out home visits, so your child can get to know their teacher in their own home environment before starting Nursery and feel more confident in their transition. To help families feel fully prepared, we also provide a detailed information pack with everything you need to know about starting Nursery with us.
Our Curriculum Offer
To inform our unique curriculum offer, we use the ‘Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage 2021’ and ‘Birth to Five Matters 2021’. The framework sets out the three prime areas of learning that underpin everything in our Nursery: Communication and Language, Physical Development, Personal, Social and Emotional Development. The four specific areas help children to strengthen and apply the prime areas: Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and Design. Then the characteristics of effective teaching and learning weave throughout. These characteristics develop as they learn to do new things, acquire new skills, develop socially and emotionally, and become better communicators. We use these areas of learning to: underpin our broad and balanced curriculum offer; to ensure that our children’s social and emotional needs are being met; and their wellbeing is being nurtured.
Communication and Language
The development of every child’s communication and language skills is at the forefront of our daily practice. The development of children’s spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development. At Little Treasures’ Nursery, we support children in their back-and-forth interactions from an early age as we know these form the foundations for language and cognitive development. We value the number and quality of the conversations our children have with adults and peers throughout the day and understand that a language-rich environment is crucial. Staff use a variety of strategies to build children’s language effectively, to ensure that children become comfortable using a rich range of vocabulary and language structures.
Phonics and Reading
Here at Little Treasures’ Nursery we follow ‘Bug Club’ for Phonics. Nursery children will be introduced to Phase 1 phonics through small, focused groups and adult-led activities. Some examples of what our phonics sessions look like include: singing Nursery Rhymes, going on sound hunts, exploring musical instruments and identifying rhyming words and alliteration. Where appropriate, teachers will introduce some children to the initial sounds from Phase 2. We encourage our children to apply their phonics learning through their play and promote mark making, the use of print within the environment and story scribing.
With regard to reading, our children are taught in an environment that is rich in reading opportunities and reading is rigorously promoted and planned. Each week we learn through a new high-quality story which enables our children to create a love of reading, immerse their imagination, make connections and deepen their understanding. We have a welcoming reading area in our Nursery which is a very popular area. The children thoroughly enjoy looking through our stories and having stories read to them. Children are encouraged to take home any of our books to share with an adult for pleasure, practise re-telling stories and to gain confidence in reading.
Mathematics
In our Nursery we aim to equip children with a sense of Mathematics as part of their world, by providing them with opportunities for practical application of their understanding. In Nursery, the children will take part in a daily, focused maths sessions lasting 10 minutes. These sessions are used to introduce new concepts, vocabulary and to create a deeper understanding about the numbers 1-5. Children are encouraged to apply and think about maths within their exploratory play. We give extensive consideration to how each area of our provision supports mathematical understanding as we want our children to bring their mathematical understanding into their experiences since this makes maths more real and more purposeful.
Learning Through Play
We aim to create enabling and irresistible indoor and outdoor learning environments, thoughtfully enhanced with authentic objects for children to explore, including items from the natural world. These resources spark curiosity, imagination and bring a unique quality to their learning and play. We hope to inspire our children and develop their curiosity to know more and learn more. We value the importance of play and how crucial it is to all areas of a child’s development, building their confidence as they learn to explore, relate to others, set their own goals and solve problems. We give our children time to become deeply involved in their play and ensure that every detail of their school day is committed to knowledge and skills growth, with children applying their skills to situations and experiences, and opening up opportunities to develop new ones alongside them.
Communication with families
At Little Treasures’ Nursery, we want to keep our parents/ carers fully informed about their child. Each child has their very own learning journal, where their artwork, photograph and observations are recorded to celebrate achievements and track progress. We also use the communication app, ‘Seesaw’ to share frequent photos, updates, and reminders with parents/ carers, ensuring families are fully involved in their child’s learning journey. We frequently invite parents into our Nursery across the year to celebrate their child’s learning journey and celebrate special occasions. We get to know the children so well by having strong parental communication and by observing and following each child’s interests, extending learning over time and planning for next steps. This approach ensures that every child, including those with SEND, is motivated, engaged, and supported to develop independence, confidence, and a lifelong love of learning.
