Express Yourself

We provide a language rich environment, supporting children to achieve their full potential. We have a library, jam packed with exciting stories which challenge children’s imagination. We support children in expanding their vocabulary through interactive activities such as cooking, gardening, acting out stories on our garden stage, story scribing, and creating their own books. Practitioners speak to the children on a continual basis asking opened ended questions, thus inviting children to engage in conversations. 

We believe it is important for children to be able to express their emotions and feelings through the arts. Children have access to perform on our purpose built theatre stage located beyond the garden fence ,where they re-enact events and stories. . Our performance space nurture’s active imagination and creativity, making nursery a fun and exciting place to be.  Performing arts is a great way for children to develop confidence, explore new ideas and different emotions. 

The nursery is full of a range of different materials, fabrics, paints and sensory experiences to evoke imagination, creativity and enhance motor skills.

We adopt a varied approach when teaching phonics to the children in our care; below is the various but not exhaustive list of activities we engage in to enhance children’s phonics skills.

• Sing songs
• Mimic musical sounds – sounds from nature
• Clap a rhythm
• Individual letter sounds
• Blending two letters together. E.g. sh, ow, ph.
• Blending short 3 letter words.
• Library system, encourages continued learning at home.
• Reading a variety of books from short stories, traditional folk tale and non-fiction books. 

We teach Makaton within our setting, which helps support spoken language. Signing enables our children to further their communication and language skills using visual aids. This method of learning is particularly beneficial for those children who struggle with speech and communication. Makaton also supports emotional development enabling children to better express emotions, which in turn can support relationship building, and the development of attention and listening skills.

Children have free access to a range of toys which encourage role-play. Our home-corner offers a range of costumes and outfits as well as kitchen and market play, where children can prepare imaginary meals and sell food. Children are free to self-select a range of diverse toys which aid their understanding of the world e.g., small world, transport, hairdressing dolls, medical equipment and toys/costumes from around the world to name but a few. Practitioners listen and observe children’s responses during play and support their creativity and learning through actively communicating with children and allowing them to lead the way.