This is the first room the children will come in to each session to put their belongings away. We also have a board on the wall where their name card will be displayed and we ask them to find their name each day as a way of doing self-registration and simple phonic recognition. The children also have their own tray in this room which they will become used to emptying independently each day. In this room we have a cosy reading area, puzzles and mark making resources but the bulk of our play in this room is down on the floor. We are fortunate enough to have a very large loft space which stores toys of every theme. We have a train track, farm yard, sea world, Barbies and ponies, duplo, space rockets, pirate ships with treasure as well as many more. As the children interests change and evolve we bring out different resources to enhance their learning and have lots of fun.

In this room we set up activities which will really spark the children’s imagination and sense of role play. We often have a home corner and dressing up but other scenarios include a shop, dentist, vets, doctors, builder’s yard, hairdressers and many more. We follow the children’s interests and live to create environments which they will be engaged in. There is also toys for self-selection in this room and the downstairs bathroom is easy for them to access independently.

This is our room where a lot of creativity happens! Children can access paints, clay, gluing, playdough and many more fun activities. Our free standing art trolley has a mass of activities for the children to self-select from pencils, paper and envelopes to chalks, stencils, rulers and magazines for cutting and gluing. This is also the room where we have our cookery sessions. Each half term we choose a recipe which is relevant to the children’s learning such as spicy pakoras around Eid or heart cookies for Valentine’s Day. We encourage lots of skills such as cutting, spreading, grating, weighing and even cracking our own eggs. The children cook in small groups several times through the half term so they can keep practising these great skills.

In this room we have our pet fish called Chase, Marshal, Sky, Rocky and Rubble. We also have a huge range of resources which encourage construction and investigation along with puzzles, board games and matching games. This area is often used for floor as well as table top activities. Our map of the world on the wall is used for identifying countries that our friend’s families come from and places which families go to on holiday. This prompts lots of natural investigation about different countries and cultures which the children love to absorb themselves in to. Our pre-school tablet and resource books also help to strengthen the children’s understanding of a range of non-fiction themes such as space, our bodies, nature, simple science, dinosaurs, what are germs and many more interesting facts!

In our small but compact kitchen we enjoy the children’s cafe! Cafe is the name the children call snack time which takes place between 9:30am-11am. We encourage the children to independently come to cafe after washing their hands. They register themselves by taking their name card off the board and placing it in the box. This helps with their early phonic recognition in a way which is fun. We offer a range of seasonal fruits and vegetables for the children to try from carrot sticks, peppers, satsumas, apples, pears, grapes, melon, and sugar snap peas along with cheese cubes, hummus, wholemeal pittas, toast, crackers, bread sticks and multigrain hoops. We offer cow’s milk or water to drink. Building children’s independence skills is a huge part of cafe with children learning how to pour their own drinks from a small jug, spread their own butter on a cracker, cut their own fruit with a knife and peel their own bananas. Cafe is a small group activity with 4 children and one adult which enables us to have some wonderful conversations with the children about where in the world our food comes from, how it grows and what benefit it has on our bodies’ health. Something as simple as snack time is a great way for us to put in some learning without the children knowing!

Our wonderful garden is set out over two levels and has lots of different areas for play and learning. On our courtyard the children grow their own vegetables such as peas, tomatoes and courgettes. Down in the main area of our garden we have a play house, track for bikes and scooters and a built in sand area. In our outside store we have a huge amount of resources for extending the children’s learning from large climbing frames and slides to stilts and hula hoops. We enjoy playing games such as ‘what’s the time Mr Wolf’ and ‘duck, duck, goose’ to help the children learn to take turns and listen to their friends. We like to be outside in all weathers and enjoy exploring our local village as often as possible.