Astley Nature Kindergarten

As part of our curriculum, we are committed to ensuring children are physically active for a minimum of 3 hours per day.  Physical Development Champions at each nursery are passionate about physical development and create and design specific activities based around movement, raising the heartbeat and exercising the cardiovascular system.

Our nursery encourages children to celebrate festivals throughout the year.  This is one of the best ways for children to learn about different religions and cultures by celebrating various world religious festivals, food tasting from different countries and dressing up in the national dress of their friends.

We provide children with opportunities to explore the use of real tools and natural materials under our supervision.  Risky play encourages the development of excellent motor skills, communication, concentration and co-ordination and gives our children enormous scope to engage with their surroundings.

We believe that reading should be lots of fun, so we run a mini-library service to encourage children to share their favourite stories with their parents, and to help busy parents keep the bookshelf engaging at home! Our nurseries organise regular library visits as part of the learning process.

Thrive Childcare and Education understands the importance of promoting language and communication. Through our Every Child’s A Talker (ETAC) language programme, we seek to identify speech and language difficulties with an aim to providing detailed, age-appropriate language sessions in each of our nursery rooms.  Babies and Toddlers have lots of fun at our Sing and Sign.

Forest School is an inspirational process that offers our children opportunities to develop their self-confidence through hands-on learning experiences in our woodland gardens and outdoor classrooms.

Our nurseries provide an extensive range of resources to encourage children to learn through play.  We favour naturalistic learning resources and make fantastic use of our outdoor equipment, promoting free-flow and child-led learning.

Eco Schools is the largest sustainable schools programme in the world and is designed to encourage action on sustainable development issues.  Our children love getting involved in their Eco Schools projects and learning about how to help protect the environment.

www.eco-schools.org.uk

Taking part in fundraising activities helps children to learn about others that are less fortunate than themselves and to understand how we can help them.  Fundraising events are good fun and are a great way to bring children, families and communities together.  Some of the fundraisers we have taken part in are: sponsored toddles, superhero days, baking cakes to sell and garden parties.

We celebrate the big move to primary school with a special graduation ceremony each year – caps, gowns, the works!

We encourage Heuristic Play with our 1–2-year-olds, embracing every child’s natural curiosity.  Heuristic play involves offering children a range of different objects and receptacles with which they are encouraged to play freely without adult instruction.

We make use of our wonderful outdoor spaces and forest areas by encouraging children at our nurseries to plant, grow and tend to fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbs throughout the year.

Our nurseries offer free settling-in sessions.  Parents can bring their child for a couple of hours first, gradually introducing the child to a new environment.  Settling-in sessions are aimed at helping your child to adapt to their new surroundings and become more familiar with the staff and other children.

Our E-Learning journals and Parent Zone app allow you to see your child’s activities at nursery with the click of a button.  Staff upload images and notes about your child’s participation in activities at nursery for you to access wherever you are.  Our nursery tablets offer exciting and stimulating learning experiences tailored to challenge and engage little ones.

Just another way we aim to make life run a little smoother for our families – many of our nurseries offer delivery acceptance.  You can have deliveries/parcels/post sent to your nursery and collect anything when you come to the nursery for pick-up!

Daily Mile is physical activity and health and well-being in a social, outdoors context.  It is not active play, physical education or outdoor learning, although participating in The Daily Mile can encourage curiosity and interest in outdoor environments in keeping with wider outdoor learning opportunities.  The main goal is to increase daily activity.

Wherever we can we encourage children to partake in preparing their meals at nursery.  We love to see children take pride in their culinary creations and enjoy healthy and delicious food.