January 2021 at Atworth
It’s the start of a new year and we have been very busy after the Christmas break.
Have a look at what we have been up to through January…
Babies and toddlers have been getting messy and creative with paints! Using all the colours of the rainbow, paintbrushes, rollers, hands and feet they have been creating beautiful works of art.
They have been exploring fruits and vegetables and talking about healthy eating by feeling and tasting the fruits and vegetables and exploring their smell and texture. Toddlers made prints with the fruits and vegetables for our menu of the week display and then played with them in the role play kitchen.
Our main priority of our nursery, especially our baby room is our relationships and high quality care of our babies and children. I know it’s a hard job but yes we give lots of cuddles to our babies!
What’s our favourite thing to do in the baby room I hear you ask….. getting cosy and snuggling down with lots of cuddles, stories and comfy cushions.
Trevor the very friendly tiger came to tea!
The tiger came to tea and the babies had lots of fun creating a little tea party and feeding him lots of yummy food.
🎶 ‘Do you want to build a snowman?’ 🎶
We had so much fun exploring the snow at nursery. It fell at the weekend and because the nursery was closed at the weekend we could explore LOTS of untouched snow!
We had snowball fights, made snow angels and our toddlers even made a snowman.
The toddlers thought the snowman looked a little cold so we kindly shared our hats and gloves with him. He has lasted for days! We even had trays of snow inside but when we had our tea it disappeared. Maybe you know where it went?
Birthdays…
We know that celebrating your child’s birthday can be a bit tricky at the moment so we would like to help in any way we can.
If your child has a birthday coming up please get in touch and let us know.
If you would like to bring in packaged items e.g. balloons, sweets, hats we will be happy to arrange for these to be given out and have a little party to celebrate. We can even have a little sing song too!
Parents are more than welcome to bring in cakes which we will be able to cut up and send home with the children. Please can we remind you all that we are a nut-free nursery.
Share the love
We feel that the last year has lacked a bit of love so this year we want to promote kindness, love and smiles!
With Valentines day fast approaching we would love to see some great videos of your families having cuddles, kisses and fun times. We are hoping to make a lovely Snapdragons ‘Share the love’ video.
Please do send us your ‘Share the love’ videos. These will be shared on our Snapdragons social media so please send us videos that you don’t mind being shared there. It doesn’t have to cost anything. Just a quick cuddle, kiss or smile from our friends and families at Atworth.
We will also be making little videos of our ‘Share the love’ moments in the nursery that you will be able to see on our special video.
Be creative and have fun! After last year, I think we all agree, that we all need a little more kindness in the world!
Just send them to: atworth@snapdragonsnursery.com
The way we plan and observe is being updated…..
As a company we are starting to move away from our current systems to focus on individual children and to react on what they are interested in and what they need to develop next as an individual in that moment. Over the next few months we will be training our room teams to work with ‘In the moment planning’. This means that the observations on ParentZone may look a little different but I will explain all below.
Observations
The way our staff record observations is also changing slightly. Moving forward you will see comments written with the following structure: Observation, Teachable Moment, Outcome, This new format shows you that our wonderful practitioners are continually helping your child to progress in all areas of learning, and should make it clear what new skills they are currently mastering at nursery. Alongside these new observations, you will also receive additional ‘Snapshots’ of your child’s time at nursery, in the form of photos, videos, and comments. If you have any trouble accessing your ParentZone account then please let us know and we can resend the welcome email. If you have any questions about these assessments or observations then please feel free to drop me email or give me a call at Atworth.
Assessments
Within the next week, you will receive an ‘assessment’ for your child on your ParentZone account. Our staff complete these assessments as a tracking tool, to help your child make the maximum progress whilst they are with us at Snapdragons. The software that we use to complete these assessments automatically uses a colour coding system. This means that you will see red, yellow, or green, alongside an age bracket recorded in months, for each area of learning. I know this can look worrying if you see a lot of red, but all this means is that your child is at the beginning of showing these skills whilst at nursery. Even if these skills are part of a higher age bracket, it will still show up as red. Children all develop in their own ways and at their own pace. Please rest assured that if we were ever concerned about your child’s development then we would always speak with you in the first instance.
Schemas, what are they?
Schema is just a fancy word for a framework of learning. Children may have one, two or lots of schemas working at one time. Have you ever noticed that you child just LOVES filling your bag with items or you look around the house to find things hidden inside of things. This would be an enclosure schema - they just love putting things inside of other things. Please have a little read of the document below to learn more about these. We will be using these more and more in our observations to really tailor our practice, opportunities and environments to our children’s learning. We would love to hear what schemas you have observed at home too!
