Alphablocks Nursery School | Ofsted Outstanding | Hadley WoodWritten by Laura Rodemeyer, EYTS, Qualified Forest School Practitioner
We want our children to feel a sense of belonging and responsibility towards their environment, have a sound knowledge of the flora and fauna that surrounds them and to be able to recognise the beauty and importance of the natural world. The Forest School approach is a useful tool to achieve these goals, giving children opportunities to learn about and explore the world they live in.
The older a child gets the harder it is to get them to engage with and truly appreciate mathematics and the powerful reasoning behind it. Therefore, introducing maths at an early age is of crucial importance: not only does it help them understand how to deal with abstract symbols, like numbers, but more importantly it helps them develop problem solving and reasoning skills.
Children need to be given an opportunity to practice their skills with numbers, linking them to concrete quantities, which are out there in the physical world, their sensory world. Knowledge of shapes and patterns also improves their competence and confidence in using mathematical concepts and language.
However, shapes, space, and measures is a key area that the Government is considering to remove from the Early Years curriculum from next year. As an outstanding nursery school, we place a lot of value on this area and we will certainly continue teaching and developing it. In this post, we summarise some of the things you can do at home to support your child’s learning in this area, which is so beneficial to children.
Children at the age of two start developing a strong drive for independence and determination. They begin to want to do things for themselves. Most of the time this drive does not coincide with their actual abilities to do things in a timely or effective way. For example, children might not have the specific coordination skills required to put on their clothes by themselves. So, quite often, parents or teachers decide to step in to help them. However, this is not the most effective approach. Children need to be offered opportunities to master new skills in order to feel capable of taking on new responsibilities. They need to learn through trial and error.
You can download and print our nursery school’s brochure.
If you haven’t visited us to meet our outstanding teachers, then you can get in touch to arrange this. Otherwise, you may want to find out some more information through the following posts:
Today we look back at Autumn and ask: What does Autumn mean for children?
Seasonal changes is a recurring theme which runs through many of our outdoor activities at Alphablocks Nursery School. The children began noticing changes in the weather from the middle of September and talked about it being rainy, or they noticed how the colours of the leaves transformed from deep greens to light yellows, gold, and brown. Warm colours of oranges and reds were to be found later on, during explorations in our sensory garden, our tall trees at the front, or indeed during our Forest School days out.
