Bede's Nursery Prospectus

NURSERY, PRE-SCHOOL AND PRE-PREP

IINTRODUCTION TO THE BABY AND TODDLER UNIT

n our Baby Unit and Nursery, we keep the youngest members of the Bede’s family safe, happy and cherished.

Each child is unique and staff at Bede’s work hard to ensure that every child has their individual needs met throughout their time here. Flexibility is at the heart of this personalised approach and we work collaboratively with parents to support and guide every child to be curious, confident and inspired.

By providing staff and facilities that are completely dedicated to the development of very young children from three months to two and a half years, we give them the independence to move to our older setting at Holywell Mount.

Bede’s Nursery is open 51 weeks a year, nurturing children in a genuinely holistic way.

SETTLING IN AND STAYING IN TOUCH

Before starting in the Nursery you and your child will be invited to come and spend some time with us for a number of Warming Up Sessions, providing an opportunity for the team to get to know you and your child better, and to understand their individual routine. We recognise that each child settles into Nursery at their own pace and staff provide the children with personalised care during this important transition period.

As your child moves through the Nursery between the different rooms, we repeat this settling-in process in order to ensure that transitions are as smooth as possible.

We know that if your child is new to the Nursery, a little unsettled or out of sorts, parents sometimes need a little extra reassurance during the day and our staff are always happy to email or phone with an update throughout the day.

At the end of the day in the Baby and Toddler Unit, parents receive a log sheet with details of your child’s day, including meals and snacks, bottles, nappy changes and, of course, sleep. In the older settings, based in Holywell Mount, parents receive detailed verbal feedback.

Across both the Baby and Toddler Unit, the day begins at 8am and finishes at 6pm, with the option of a Breakfast Club at 7.45am.

The children enjoy a balance of free play and more directed activities according to their age and development stage, as well as plenty of indoor and outdoor exploration, including daily buggy walks along the seafront promenade and surrounding area. Our daily routine is kept deliberately flexible so that we can cater for each child’s individual needs.

Each child will receive one to one support during the day with their dedicated Key Person who will also regularly observe and record activities and milestones.

All meals and snacks are prepared and cooked on site by our catering team, are nutritionally balanced and with all individual dietary needs catered for. The children eat all their meals in their own familiar surroundings.

The home corner, soft play and messy play areas, along with story time and daily singing sessions, provide the opportunity for each child to develop early language skills.

Our dedicated and relaxing Sleep Room means that children can sleep without being disturbed and daily sleeping routines can more easily be observed. Naturally, we check on the children regularly and use sleep monitors during rest times.

INTRODUCTION TO THE NURSERY AT HOLYWELL

Once Bede’s children are aged two-and-ahalf, our Holywell Nursery becomes their new home.

The building offers myriad learning opportunities including outdoor classrooms, Forest School and bespoke facilities, which support specialist lessons in subjects including Swimming, Music and Dance.

The structure of the day matches that of the Baby and Toddler Unit, with children arriving from 8am and ending at 6pm. There is also the option for children to attend the Breakfast Club, which starts at 7.45am.

Children begin in the Rainbow Fish Room around the age of two and a half. Children move up depending on when their birthday is and will spend one whole academic year in the Rainbow Fish room.

In the following September, they then move up with their friends to our PreSchool where they spend a year before starting in Reception aged four or five.

In the Rainbow Fish Room, we pride ourselves on providing a loving, caring and secure environment in which our children flourish supported by, and reliant on, our close contact with parents.

During their time here, the children are introduced to a variety of stimulating and exciting activities that offer a combination of both adult-led and childinitiated learning. Key People are always on-hand to support every individual, encouraging and helping them to fuel their own personal interests.

Children enjoy daily ‘Circle Time’, which facilitates both the advancement of friendships, the acquisition of key skills and opportunities for every girl and boy to develop their own voice.

These sessions also encourage and augment emerging language and communication skills, social skills and numeracy, and are a great confidencebuilder for many of our children.

RAINBOW FISH ROOM

With our outdoor environments accessible throughout the day, providing free-flow to and from the Nursery rooms, independence is fully encouraged at all times.

The children help to serve snacks, dress and undress independently and have easy access to the toileting areas and wash basins.

Most importantly, the Rainbow Fish room is overflowing with imaginative learning opportunities, all of which are tailored to ensure that they offer the best chance of fascinating every individual.

All children in the Nursery have ‘Quiet Time’, during which the children will either rest or engage in quiet activities such as stories, puzzles or table-top games.

Those children who need to sleep are able to do so in our relaxing Sleep Room, in which the children are monitored on a regular basis and sleep patterns are observed as per parent requests.

BEDE’S PRE-SCHOOL

Children move into the Pre-School during the last year of their time at Bede’s Nursery and in preparation for the transition into Reception, the focus is very much on promoting independence.

Upon transition to the Pre-School class, the children work together, to follow our five ‘Golden Rules’, for example, good sharing, listening to one another, good manners and of course kindness. These are embedded into the curriculum and implemented throughout all of nursery life.

We encourage the children to ‘have a go’ whilst maintaining a positive, caring and supportive environment. Positive reinforcement, alongside close links and communication with parents helps us embed these codes of behaviour and expectations.

With both Holywell and Bede’s Prep School’s facilities open to them, the Nursery children have full access to the Bede’s Prep School Swimming Pool, Library, Music Centre and Sports Hall, and they also eat in the Bede’s Prep Dining Hall, overlooking the sea. The Pre-School children also have the opportunity to catch the bus to School if parents wish them to.

Our Reception teacher also has regular sessions with the Pre-School children to enhance their development and support their transition into Reception.

We see a huge change in each child’s independence and learning during their time in Holywell, with every individual developing bags of confidence, firm friendships and plenty of new skills and knowledge.

Furthermore, with many Bede’s children having spent almost five years learning and growing in Holywell, you can feel how happy and special a place it is as soon as you walk through the door!

Elsewhere, we also organise termly trips, including trips to Friston Forest and the Downs, the theatre as well as our fortnightly Beach School. We regularly welcome visitors to the school including theatre companies, pupils from the Senior School, scientists from Herstmonceux Planetarium and many more.

Reception classes are taught in the same building as our Nursery groups, with Bede’s children staying at Holywell all the way up to Year 2 before transitioning over to the main Bede’s Prep School building. The doors open at 8.10 with the Reception day beginning at 8.25am with registration and finishes at 3.50pm. Extra-Curricular clubs (optional) take place until 4.30pm with the option of ‘Late Stay’ until 6pm.

The focus of teaching and learning is on developingcuriosity in line with our school values and fostering a lifelong love of learning. Children rotate between small group sessions with the teacher involving high quality, guided time, and time to work through activities and tasks

where they can work independently and decide on their own learning journey.

Children in the Reception year also receive weekly French lessons taught by a specialist teacher from Bede’s Prep Modern Languages department who will pick topics being covered elsewhere in the curriculum. Similarly, children benefit from specialist sports coaching in Reception and begin to learn the fundamentals of a wide range of sports including Athletics, Cricket, Football, Hockey, Tennis and Gymnastics. There are also specialist lessons in Music, Dance, Swimming and Computing.

A SPECIALIST LESSONS

unique aspect of Bede’s Nursery is the access that our children get to specialist teachers from our Prep School who work with our Nursery Team to deliver lessons in Dance, Music and Swimming.

Dance

Children start dance classes with our specialist dance teachers when they reach the Rainbow Fish Room and continue to dance through their Pre-School year.

In Dance, the children can explore their creative side and develop role-playing skills.

We also work on physical development skills such as, moving with confidence, imagination and safety, as well as starting to work on their awareness of space, coordination and control.

There is one class a week of dance and for Pre-School children there is the option to join ballet club once a week where they start to learn basic ballet skills and techniques.

Music

Music is hugely important to a child’s early development and the specialist Music teaching in Bede’s Nursery offers each child the opportunity to experience a wide range of melodies, rhythms and harmonies.

Singing forms the core of music at this stage, with action songs and songs reinforcing the development of aural and vocal skills, being interspersed with repertoire which focuses on the seasons, the world around us and language acquisition.

Early-years percussion instruments also offer the children the chance to perform together, to hear new sounds and to develop rhythmic dexterity.

Swimming

At Bede’s we believe that swimming is an essential life skill, which should be fun, enjoyable and lead to many opportunities throughout life.

From the term that your child turns three there is the opportunity for them to receive weekly swimming lessons in the heated pool at Bede’s Prep.

Our Nursery children have the opportunity to swim once every two weeks with sessions focused on enabling the children to enjoy their time in the pool, develop self-confidence and their sense of personal achievement.

The adult to child ratios are 1:2 in Rainbow Fish sessions, with a maximum of six children per class, rising to an adult to child ratio of 1:3 in Pre School sessions, with a maximum of eight children per class. This ensures that every child is fully engaged and learning throughout their lesson.

It is important that swimming lessons are a choice for our parents, as some feel this is an area of their child’s development that they wish to be integrally part of, whilst others enjoy the educational and social experience of their child learning to swim in our Nursery setting.

At Bede’s Nursery, we recognise the importance of getting the balance right between ‘Adult-Led’ and ‘Child-Initiated’ learning.

Through adult-led activities we can introduce children to new ideas, provide opportunities for them to develop their skills and ensure that they experience all areas of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS).

During adult-led learning we teach skills or concepts which the children are then encouraged to use and explore during child-led learning sessions when the children have the time and freedom to explore their own ideas, play with resources and use their imagination and creativity.

The breadth of curriculum that each child enjoys at Bede’s Nursery needs careful planning, from our Bede’s babies right up to Reception, and the care we attribute to our planning is a reflection of the needs of the individual children in a given Nursery room.

The curriculum in the early years is designed around story-telling. We use a variety of core books which provide themes and activities for the children to explore.

Our culture of balancing different learning styles and tailored planning is present throughout every child’s learning journey. Parents are also encouraged to review plans in their child’s room and may be able to extend that learning at home.

EARLY YEARS CURRICULUM

Literacy and Phonics

Literacy is an integral part of learning and children in the Nursery at Bede’s are encouraged to develop a love of reading from an early age.

In our Baby Unit, babies from as young as three months are given the opportunity to cultivate a sense of sound awareness by exploring their environment. All children are read to by staff throughout the day, and encouraged to participate themselves. Through a range of rhymes, poems and stories, our aim is to stimulate, encourage and promote a life-long love of reading.

Children learn their phonemes through the songs, games and actions of the “Monster Phonics” scheme that has a focus on the pure sounds, which are crucial to learning to read and write. Towards the end of Nursery, many of our children are ready to start learning to read and by the end of Reception, most children will have learnt their first set of key words and spell some simple, basic words with confidence.

Numeracy

Numeracy is also fundamental to a child’s learning and we help to develop basic concepts from counting and colour recognition to sorting and sequencing as early as we possibly can.

All of our Nursery rooms use an array of mathematical resources and offer a series of games and challenges. A daily numeracy slot is timetabled into each of the year groups’ days through which the children are presented with a multitude of adult-initiated tasks that challenge the children to use and extend their mathematical skills through practical involvement.

As well as our timetabled numeracy slots, frequent use of simple mathematical language is reinforced through play both indoors and outdoors, with staff consistently presenting the children with the sorts of mathematical challenges they will encounter in day-to-day life.

Bede’s Prep School has developed a strong reputation for innovative maths teaching and we strive to question and challenge the children even in these early days in order to aid their mathematical development and enable them to see that working with numbers is fun, exciting and rewarding.

Creativity

Within each room in the Baby and Toddler Unit and in Holywell Nursery, children have access to a role play area, including the home corner, a café, shops, a garden scene and castle. Children can express themselves using equipment and dressing-up clothes.

EARLY YEARS CURRICULUM

In the area of art and drawing, children at Bede’s Nursery are also encouraged to draw from observation, explore shape, pattern and texture, develop a sense of tone through use of pencils, develop their imaginative drawing, and experiment with painting as well as with using fabrics in their craftwork.

Tracking

Parents receive formal feedback on their child’s progress in an annual report as well as through termly parent consultations. Parents are also welcome to request a meeting with their child’s Key Person at other times of the year if required and of course feedback will be provided more informally on a very regular basis.

Parent consultations offer the opportunity for parents and a child’s Key Person to discuss academic progress and any pastoral matters. Parents will be able to look through their child’s folder and summative assesments and discuss areas for development.

We also use Tapestry which is an easy-to-use and secure online learning journal which helps staff and families celebrate their children’s learning and development and provides photo insights into the daily activities and achievements of their child, whilst building home - school relationships.

ADMISSIONS

We encourage parents to visit to get a feel for the way that we care for children at Bede’s Nursery. Your first visit will usually start with a tour which will include those facilities in the Prep School which the Nursery children use on a day-to-day basis. A full tour of the Prep School can also be arranged. Please contact us to arrange your visit by emailing nursery@bedes.org or calling 01323 356987. We would be happy to answer any questions ahead of your visit.

Following a tour of the Nursery and once a place has been accepted there will be a further period of settling-in which allows children to feel familiar with the Nursery before they formally start.