Glenhurst Nursery – Striving for Excellence
The Autumn term 2006 saw many changes in the Glenhurst Nursery, the main one
being that the children were settled into their beautiful new purpose-built Nursery
building, and everyone became used to the new facilities and routines. We intend that
your children should enjoy the best possible start in life, which includes their
surroundings, care and education.
Key Workers
We assign each child a Key Worker who liaises with Miss Jones to monitor and assess
the children’s individual learning goals. Your child’s Key Worker will also keep you
informed about your child’s progress and be there to help with any problems. The
children in the Kindergarten year group all have Miss Anna Jones as their Key Worker.
The children in the Nursery year group either have Mrs Emma Jones, Mrs Lynne
Pearson or Mrs Jenny Western as their Key Worker. These teachers work full or almost
full time so they are able to keep a daily eye on the children’s progress. The other
teachers who work part time also form an invaluable part of the team, and are assigned
as a partner to one of these teachers to help with observations and on-going
assessments. They each have specialist areas of interest. Miss Debbie Mitchell, with
an Honours degree in Music as well as Early Years qualifications plans musical
development for the whole school. Mrs Nadya James is a native French speaker and
helps children learning French or with French as a first language with learning English.
Mrs Annette Wickramasuriya is a qualified nurse. Mrs Wendy Chappell has a wealth of
experience from pre-school settings, and enjoys helping those with learning difficulties
as well as all forms of art and craft, and runs our after-school club on Monday evenings.
Miss Jones, Mrs Pearson and Mrs Western share the running of the after-school club
from Tuesday to Friday. We have a highly qualified staff at Glenhurst.
The Learning Environment
As our numbers of children have grown, we now have two distinct year groups. The
Kindergarten children who will be moving up to the Reception class in September and
the nursery aged children who will have another year of pre-school education. All
children benefit from the new facilities, but have different learning requirements
according to their stage of development.
At certain times of day the children are all together, for registration, playtime, lunch time
and storytime at the end of the day. Sometimes activities involve both age groups such
as whole group singing or music lessons, or parachute games. At other times, the
Kindergarten year group use the art room as a quiet area for phonics and maths. They
divide into smaller groups for structured activities, maintaining our one to six
teacher/pupil ratio.
The Nursery aged children, from two to three years old.
Children at this stage need to feel safe and secure, in a warm, nurturing environment.
We provide a team of dedicated, qualified staff to care for your children and help them
to become independent learners. Praise is given freely to children, ensuring that they
develop confidence and self-esteem, and understand when they have done well. The
teachers provide good, consistent role models for the children, to ensure that they learn
right from wrong and develop into kind, polite and caring individuals.
Children are active learners and need space and time to explore their environment and
experiment, especially with natural materials such as sand, water, dough and bubbles.
They need a chance to express their feelings through singing, dancing, painting,
drawing and role play. They need to be encouraged to develop their language and
expression through listening and telling stories, poems and rhymes, talking with adults
and playing word games. The teachers ensure that they have daily opportunities to
stretch their imaginations and increase their vocabulary by learning about plants,
creatures and machines, naming parts and talking about how things work and why
things happen. They learn to recognise their written name and begin to learn the
sounds of letters and experiment with writing and tracing and forming letters from dough
or in sand. They learn through play the language of mathematics by counting, sorting,
measuring and talking about shapes and sizes. They extend their knowledge and
understanding of the world through tasting and cooking different foods, meeting visitors
such as policemen and firemen or the local librarian. There are frequent opportunities
to take part in new experiences such as planting seeds, going on a mini-beast hunt or
taking part in a special celebration. By manipulating small construction pieces, using
tools, climbing, jumping, dancing and pedalling bikes the children become more agile,
co-ordinated and self-controlled. The staff plan new learning goals for each child to
ensure that whatever their level of development, they are being challenged and
prepared for the next stage.
The Kindergarten aged children, from three to four years old.
These children still need their familiar adults and routines, but are growing in confidence
to try new experiences, foods and games. They are becoming more confident when
role playing familiar activities such as The Shop, Doctors or Hair Dressers. They still
need time for free choice and role play and plenty of physical activity and outdoor play.
Academically, they will be continually expanding their vocabulary and general
knowledge. They learn all their letter sounds through daily practice with the Jolly
Phonics activities, and are provided will Jolly Phonics letters to take home to practice.
Activities are planned to increase their pencil control, such as tracing, dot to dot and
forming letters in dough, sand or on white boards, and they are given opportunities to
practice emergent writing through real tasks and role play. On Thursday afternoons the
children either use the inter-active white board or have a twenty minute lesson on
individual lap-tops which provide another stimulating variation to their learning of
phonics and number. We aim for children to know all their sounds, write their name
forming some or most letters correctly and to begin to recognise familiar words by the
end of this year. As their mathematical abilities develop we expect children to be
counting beyond 10, recognising written numerals and learning to shape them correctly.
They learn to match with one to one correspondence, naming shapes correctly and
sorting objects according to given criteria. Class Music lessons take place on
Wednesday mornings, though singing and rhymes take place most days. Each child is
given individual learning targets to match their stage of development and ability. These
will ensure that every child is challenged to move on to the next level of learning and noone is held back.