October at Snapdragons Atworth
Hi Everyone we are settling in well to the new academic year here at Snapdragons Atworth!
We have had a few wiggles and jiggles with our staffing team lately so please do have a look on our website to get yourselves acquainted with the team!
Jamie has also completed her NVQ3 and has just started her Degree - a huge congratulations and good luck to her.
Kim has been promoted to Head of Pre-school. Well done Kim, it is truly deserved! When you see her make sure you say a big well done and give her a big pat on the back!
Kim is a truly homegrown member of the team. She started in our Pre-school room and quickly completed her NVQ level 3. She has three older children so she knows children inside and out. She is based in our Pre- School room where her passion is Sunshine circles!
In other news Ella is now our Deputy Manager, as well as carrying on with her Head of Toddler role. She’s enjoying her new role so you may see her across the nursery in all of our rooms!
Congratulations Ella!
In some very exciting news Zoe, Sarah and Lindsey have all had their beautiful babies. Zoe has had a little boy called Monty. Sarah has had a little girl called Gracie and Lindsey had a little boy called Zachary. A huge congratulations to them all!
What’s happening at Atworth?
Messy activities!
The children have been making the most of the lovely dry weather, with lots of fun activities outside including making an obstacle course and outdoor painting!
Exploring foam in the baby room was very exciting! We enjoyed the feeling the texture and of course getting messy!
Pre-school also made some cloud dough and enjoyed mixing up the all ingredients to make this.
Come on in!
Firstly, it has been great being able to invite the parents into the nursery to collect the children. It’s great to see everyone inside, to be able to show off our nursery environment and for you all to see the children engaged in their play.
Please remember to wear a mask if you are entering the nursery and ensure that you are socially distancing from the team. We are still being precautious with our approach and are allowing parents into our hall areas rather than going fully into rooms. This is just to restrict the risk to the children and the staff team.
Collections will still be brief, we will only allow a few parents into the nursery but we will be popping weekly pictures of the happenings of your child’s day on to ParentZone.
Childrens Observations
Some of you may be aware of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), which is a statutory document that all Ofsted registered childcare providers are required to follow.
The EYFS framework sets the standards to ensure that children aged from birth to 5 learn and develop well and are kept healthy and safe.
The framework has had a reform from September 2021 and this means a few changes for us. There is now a requirement for leaders and managers to reduce the workload for our fantastic practitioners, such as unnecessary paperwork, so they can spend more time with your children.
Within the educational programmes there is also more focus on early language development and extending vocabulary in young children. Its importance in underpinning children’s development within the broader curriculum has been acknowledged. Communication and Language development has always been a focus in our teaching at Snapdragons, as well as personal social and emotional development. We feel these two areas are a priority in children’s learning; without language skills or resilience and social skills, children may find the next stage of their learning more challenging.
There are some useful resources to support language development that you may be interested in, including “Top Tips for Talking”, a handout which you can collect from the office and “Ages and Stages” which you can find at ican.org.uk.
Another change is that we are now required to design our own curriculum around the educational programmes set out by the EYFS. We have always used the educational programmes to inform our teaching at nursery, but now we have been given the opportunity to collaborate as a whole nursery group about the main things that we want our children to learn whilst they are at nursery.
There are 10 themes to our curriculum and these 10 themes are the starting point of who we want our children to be, what we want them to learn and be able to do at each stage of their time at nursery, from the baby room all the way through to when they leave us for school.
Thrive through secure attachments and positive relationships to be safe, secure and loved
Communicate with confidence to be talkative and love language.
Develop self-help skills to be capable and proud of increasing independence
Move with control and coordination to be strong, active and healthy
Explore and investigate with curiosity to be curious, fascinated and deeply involved
Experience music, song and dance to be joyful, exuberant and confident
Develop a love of books and story to be enthralled, engaged and enquiring
Make their mark to be willing to have a go and explore
Be creative to be experimental and expressive
Make Maths meaningful to be motivated by mathematics in everyday life
Embedded in this approach is our commitment to making sure our children feel part of a global community. Please collect your full copy of our Snapdragons curriculum from the office.
You may have noticed recently that the style of your child’s observations have changed. We have been using a new planning system this year called “in the moment planning”. This means we teach the children in the moment, when they are particularly motivated or involved in what they are doing using their interests to motivate their learning. For example, we could teach a child about mathematical concepts of ‘under’ and ‘over’, when building a bridge for the train track they are playing with. You may have seen some entries in your child’s learning journey on Parent Zone in this style, where we document the initial observation, the teaching and then the impact that makes on the child’s learning.
We are going to continue to plan and teach our children this way, however, in line with the new requirement of reduction in paperwork, we will no longer be requiring staff to update the online learning journeys in this format.
I want to give an updated outline of what you should expect to see on your child’s learning journey.
1 photo or video snapshot per week per child.
Assessments used to be done three times a year on all children, these are now only done on children who fall within the ‘vulnerable’ category (children who are in receipt of the two-year-old funding, children who have English as an additional language, children who are classed as looked after by the local authorities, children with SEND) or for any child whom requires additional support.
The statutory progress check at age two, which will continue to be completed by your child's key person at around 30 months.
A ‘moving to school’ assessment in the term before your child starts school.
Every term your child will be the focus child for the week. At the end of this week, you will see your child’s focus child form uploaded to their learning journey.
When your child is selected as the focus child, you will be emailed with a learning contribution form which we would be very grateful if you could complete and send back to us, you are your child’s main educator and it’s important to us to be up to date on how you think your child is progressing.
Alongside our Snapdragons Curriculum Teaching Toolkit, we have recently published on our website our Teaching Philosophy. This is Snapdragons’ pedagogy and it details all the practices we follow at Snapdragons to support your child’s learning and development. I really encourage you to take a look at this page of our website.
Fundraising at Atworth…
We recently held a week of fundraising for breast cancer awareness. The children and staff dressed in pink and we had some lovely cakes on sale as well as guess the smarties in the jar!
Thankyou to all those who donated! We raised a grand total of £114.43! Well done to our chef Mel who won guess the smarties!
Every stamp counts!
We will be collecting used stamps very shortly for the Charity Kicks Count, please hand them to our team and we can pop them in our collection box.
Children in Need day!
On the 19th November 2021 we will be fundraising for Children in Need.
Children in Need supports some specialist nurseries that we work very closely with such as Stepping stones so it's a cause really close to our hearts! Please do donate generously.
Your children (and yourselves) are welcome to dress up as their favourite superhero, Prince or Princess! We are recommending a £1 donation per child.
Christmas Nativity
Kim and the team started practicing all the songs for the Christmas nativity which will be on December 8th! Keep an eye out closer to the date for more information!