Early Years

By Mrs Mason, Head of Early Years

What a year we have all had! Despite these incredibly disconcerting times, we do still have so much to celebrate within our Early Years Department.

Over the summer of 2019, we finished updating our Nursery building. We are incredibly pleased with all our new, neutral and calming spaces. We are continuing to look at our resources and are slowly moving away from artificial manufactured items and continue to focus more on natural, loose part materials. Of course, these will take many years to build up, but we have made a good start, and our children certainly have access to a broader scope of new learning materials and opportunities. I am incredibly excited to watch this develop over the years.

As we move forward, we are looking to redesign and develop our Pre-Prep provision, again creating a neutral, natural and non-overstimulating environment. We will continue to provide lots of challenging opportunities for the children using a vast array of resources and look forward to sharing with you how this progresses over the year. In October we had a wonderful visit from ‘Animals Take Over’. The children had the opportunity to get up close and personal with some frogs, a chinchilla, a snake, a sugar glider, a hedgehog, a bearded dragon and so much more. It is truly amazing to watch the curiosity and wonder on their faces, particularly with our youngest children as they are simply bursting with inquisitiveness! Children can learn to be fearful from the anxieties of others around them, so we provide an environment that is calm, encouraging and patient, and gives the children the confidence to have a go. We are very much looking forward to a return visit at the start of the next academic year.

In November, we opened The Rising 3s Room led by Mrs Samantha Tempest. This learning stage is designed to be slightly more challenging than the Toddler room and will be preparing the children for their transition over to PrePrep. We are now able to focus a little more on phonics preparation, pre-writing skills, independent skills and developing the children’s social interactions with both adults and their peers.

The room is once again a very calming space but continues to provide a fun environment, thought-provoking and challenging. This will encourage all the children to extend their learning naturally with an Early Years Educator scaffolding their progress.

Back in November 2019, we participated in a fundraising event for Tam O’Shanter Farm. The children made some animal handprints on canvas, and families were able to purchase them from us. All funds raised went to help support the farm, as they survive on donations and

fundraising alone. They have had a particularly hard time

throughout the lockdown period, but after a recent social media push became overwhelmed by donations and funds. It was fantastic to hear the local community pull together to support such an important local amenity, particularly when we all facing our own challenges. The sense of community and looking out for one another has been something incredibly positive to come out of this experience.

In December, we worked with Wirral’s Home-Start Project to support three families over the festive period. We collected numerous gifts for the children, along with food hampers and pamper bags for the mums. The families concerned were hugely overwhelmed by the generosity of the Nursery parents and staff, and it truly made an enormous difference to their whole Christmas experience. The School is fortunate to have an amazing Design and Technology department who designed and made some stunning Rudolph name tags for the Nursery children as a Christmas present. A genuinely wonderful memento that can be brought out year after year! As we are all very well aware…normal life was halted rather abruptly, and the lockdown began in March. This presented us all with many challenges, not least how do we support our children and families remotely, particularly with a heavy furloughed team. We needed to adapt and be creative, and the team initially prepared four weeks’ worth of activities and resources personalised for individual children. As the lockdown continued, it became apparent that we would not be able to reach all our families with additional resources. We began to contact them daily with activities ideas, weekly challenges, strategies for parents who may be struggling with behaviours and of course, links to our YouTube channel. Staff were way out of their comfort zone with the filming but were encouraged by such a fantastic response from our families, so it soon took on its own momentum supporting the weekly challenges, developing letters & sounds skills, music and movement as well as favourite stories. Such was the response from families that we would really like to continue running this alongside our Early Years Department as we move into the next academic year.

We have all certainly had a very different kind of year at the

School and yet still so much has been achieved.