Nursery
Welcome to Autumn Term in Nursery
(2025-2026)
A warm welcome to you all and to a new and exciting year in Nursery Class. We are thrilled to have your children join our community and look forward to a year of fun, growth, and discovery together.
Nursery Team:
Nursery teachers
Mrs Franek (Monday-Wednesday)
Mrs Cook (Thursday and Friday)
Support staff:
Miss Taylor (Monday - Friday am / Wednesday and Thursday pm)
Mrs Warner - PPA cover (Tuesday am)
Our Philosophy
Our Philosophy is to value every child as a unique individual, who enjoys learning and thinking for him or herself. Our aim is to provide a happy, safe and stimulating environment, which allows all children to feel secure and valued and therefore ready and eager to learn. We provide a supportive and secure environment in which every child can flourish and learn at their own pace and in their own individual way.
Our role is to stimulate and encourage their development and enjoyment of learning through a variety of different activities, both adult directed and child initiated in secure indoor and outdoor situations.
We believe the relationships which the children develop in the Early Years, with each other and with our staff, are central to their happiness and will lay the best possible foundation for them to become independent lifelong learners.
Working together is important. We believe in a strong partnership between home and nursery, and your involvement is incredibly valuable. We encourage you to participate in our school events, contribute to your child's learning journal and stay in touch - we are always available to answer questions.
We can't wait to get to know your children. Here's to a fantastic term and year ahead!
Mrs Franek and Mrs Cook
Nursery Timetable
Additional Information:
Essential items:
Please send in a named water bottle for classroom use; this is additional to a lunchtime drink if your child is bringing a packed lunch from home when they stay all day.
Our learning environment includes being outside in all weathers. Please ensure your child has a warm, waterproof jacket in school every day, thank you.
Wellie boots - please send in a pair of named wellie boots to be kept at school for outdoor use.
A named warm hat or sun hat, as appropriate.
Optional items:
Long scarves can get caught up on play equipment. Snoods are suitable.
Gloves, may be worn if your child can put them on independently. Mittens are suitable.
Thank you for your support.
Library (Friday morning):
We have a fantastic school library with an excellent range of picture books for the children to enjoy choosing from and to share with their family at home.
We plan to visit the library every Friday to select one book to bring home every week. Please make sure that your child's library book is returned the following Friday morning. Unfortunately, we are not able to issue a new book unless the previous one has been returned.
PE (Friday morning):
Children wear their PE kit to school for the day:
Their usual jogging bottoms (shorts in the spring / summer) with their House t-shirt and trainers (no lace-ups).
Please refer to the school uniform list.
Further Information:
Our Curriculum
Children in our Early Years phase follow the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Curriculum, which consists of seven areas of learning. We teach children by ensuring challenging, playful opportunities across both the prime and specific areas of learning. We recognise that all children develop and learn at different rates and so our EYFS curriculum is designed flexibly to meet the needs of all individuals. We support individual learning through our skilful interactions and observations which lead to detailed next step planning. The Characteristics of Effective Learning underpin our curriculum and pupils learning, through an enabling and well-planned environment we ensure we provide meaningful opportunities for playing and learning, active learning and creating and thinking critically. As children utilise and develop these characteristics, they become effective and motivated learners who demonstrate high levels of well-being and involvement.
Characteristics of Effective Learning
The characteristics of effective learning underpin our pupils learning within the Early Years Foundation Stage. The ways in which they engage with others and their environment – playing and exploring, active learning and creating and thinking critically – underpin learning and development across all areas and support children to remain effective and motivated learners. We make judgements about a child's demonstration of the Characteristics of Effective Learning at their particular age / stage of development and whether or not the learning behaviours defined within these characteristics describes the child.
Tapestry
We use Tapestry to record children’s knowledge, skills and learning dispositions in individual Learning Journals, and to assess the characteristics of effective learning. It is a consistent and reliable way of demonstrating progress through the EYFS.
Through daily observation and interaction, we can build a rich and accurate understanding of each child across all aspects of learning and development. Observations are shared with families. You can share all the wonderful things you do with your child at home using Tapestry, by uploading via the website or App.
Whilst we would love to show you all the wonderful things your child has been doing throughout the day, it is not practical as we value the importance of being with the children and not always having a tablet in between us. Therefore, some weeks you will have more observations than others because we have been engaging and playing and didn’t want to stop the flow to take a photograph or video clip. Observations are used to support our ongoing assessments.
Assessments are meaningful and impact on our children’s learning and development as we use them to inform next steps, which are personalised and challenging.
At the end of Reception, Learning Journals can be downloaded for you to keep and treasure.
Please see below for further curriculum details such as the overview and curriculum newsletter.