Alphablocks Nursery School was inspected by Ofsted in the Summer Term of 2024. Our school is pleased to announce the results of this latest inspection by Ofsted, which can be read in full here:
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Author: Alphablocks Nursery School
Books form a central part of our educational approach at Alphablocks Nursery School. They are used to support us in planning the learning experiences offered in the classroom. This half term we have chosen Traditional Fairy Tales as our central theme.
Executive Summary
Alphablocks Nursery School is committed to providing outstanding education and empowering children to become confident learners. In 2023, our research organisation, Alphablocks Research Lab, funded academic work that made significant contributions in the exploration of childhood social cognitive abilities and mental health outcomes. This report summarises the year’s achievements.
There are a few aspects of child development that teachers, parents and carers often talk about when it comes to nursery-age children. These include aspects of development such as the physical, social, and emotional growth of a child, early literacy and numeracy abilities, or self-regulation skills. However, an area of development that has been relatively overlooked is that of social cognition. It includes a complex set of skills that are crucial for development and have long-lasting impact, well beyond childhood. In this post, we briefly discuss the basic dimensions of social cognition in early childhood, and summarise some recent findings that have come out of our work at Alphablocks Research Lab in collaboration with leading academics.
In early years education, reading comprehension refers to a child’s ability to understand and interpret what is being read to them. It involves a specific set of skills, such as vocabulary understanding, word recognition, decoding (the ability to read some individual words), and question answering (the ability to ask or answer questions about what has been read to them).
The importance of early reading comprehension cannot be underestimated, as numerous studies over the past decades show that it lays the foundation for future outcomes at school, and has been linked to better self-regulation and social-cognitive abilities. In turn, these are known to support overall well-being, are conducive to learning and act as a protective factor for a range of early mental health challenges.