In the Pre-school room, we welcome children from the age of 3 ½ to 5 years old. Throughout their time with us we get them school ready. Using the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) to track their development and plan appropriate activities, we tailor these activities to suit their individual needs and interests.
In Pre-school we can have up to 16 children, as it is a small group it allows us as their key person to adapt activities and our support to suit each child’s individual needs and abilities.
Across the whole of Joint Colleges Nursery, the link between home and nursery is vital to support your child’s learning and development. We support this by using an online portal called ‘Tapestry’ where we can upload observations and log their development alongside the EYFS. During our group times we ask the children what they get up to over the weekend, who is in their family and what they eat for breakfast. Twice a year we carry out summative assessment development meetings with the parents, this give the parents a chance to ask any questions about their child’s development and so they can have more of an insight of life and learning within pre-school.
Within the Pre-school room, we have the following areas to support your child’s development and play:
- HOME CORNER: As you can see in the picture, we have kitchen toy units in our home corner, this allows the children to bring in experiences from their homes throughout their nursery day. It is rotated between this, a shop, hospital and café.
- SMALL WORLD AND CONSTRUCTION AREA: The small world supports the children’s imagination, by playing with farm animals, village people, dinosaurs and insects. The construction area develops their mathematics learning by having available toys that support them to make enclosed spaces with the construction toys. This may be through their play with the mobilo, stickles bricks, magnetics or wooden train set toys.
- CREATIVE/ART TABLE: On this table we also do sensory activities such as slime, play dough and many more. We develop the children’s creative skills by providing different materials and ways in which they draw and express themselves through craft. We have various different drawing/art materials for the children to use; paint, crayons, chalk or oil pastels, felt tip pens and pencils.
- MATHEMATICS TABLE: We focus a lot on mathematics in our room, learning to identify numbers 1-10, counting out objects to represent a number, measuring, weighing, threading and doing various activities involving shapes.
- TUFT SPOT: in the tuft spot we mainly stick with water or sand play. This supports the children’s sensory play, as well as mathematics as they empty and fill different containers/beakers.
In Pre-school, we also focus on literacy and physical development:
- LITERACY: Everyday we do group times, three times a week we do Jolly Phonics activities. Throughout these we learn to recognise the letters, the sound, a song with the letter and an action. Each week we focus on one letter. Then every so often we’ll go over all the letters we’ve learnt so far. We do a lot of reading time, this can either be done by the staff or the children. The pictures will allow them to try and tell the story themselves.
- To support their PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT, we do various activities with them, such as yoga, tiny tigers which is carried out by Katie who is trained in martial arts. On a Friday we do forest school that is run by our Forest School Leader Becky, we do gardening at our local community allotment and in our garden, we put together obstacle courses so the children can develop their skills to move around in different ways.
