Welcome to Nursery at Bramley Park Academy
Nursery is all about laying the foundations of all future learning through having fun and having lots of hands-on practical experiences. We do lots of that from the very moment we walk through the door.
Our Curriculum
Our curriculum is rich in stories, songs and rhythm and rhyme to support our language development and to open up the door to a range of themes, topics and hooks to inspire our curiosity and wonder! Through careful planning we cover all 7 areas of the EYFS curriculum and build our love of learning on the way!
Take a look at our long term curriculum maps on the main page to see what exciting adventures and skills we are learning each half term! I bet you cannot wait to join us!
Phonics in Nursery
We love our SuperSonic Phonic Friends!
To support the planning and delivery of phonics in school, we use Supersonic Phonic Friends to provide rigorous, well-planned, consistent daily engaging phonics lessons.
Our phonics teaching starts in Nursery and follows the 7 aspects of the Firm Foundations section of our scheme. The curriculum is built on a love of stories, songs and nursery rhymes and the phonic focus is on listening and identifying the different sounds we hear in our environment and in songs, stories and rhymes. Once children can hear and differentiate between sounds they are ready to begin orally blending and segmenting words. In Nursery we adopt a mastery approach to ensure all children enter Reception with the fundamental auditory skills required for them to be ready to access the next stage of their phonic teaching.
The Nursery phonics curriculum is split up into 7 aspects.
Our Mark Making Journey – Our first steps to becoming a writer!
Our daily routine and structure enables even the youngest of children to build their muscles and fingers in preparation for writing! All our resources are selected carefully to encourage the strengthening of little fingers to ensure we all can hold a pencil effectively! We love to thread, draw, dig and pour in our play and these ensure we are ready to write! Daily dough disco and Squiggle sessions teach us how to make sure we are prepared as well as model the movements we will later need to form letters! We also love to draw, write our names and paint on a small and large scale!
Making Maths Magic – Our journey into counting and numbers!
Over the course of the year we will count, match and sing to embed our number knowledge. We will learn that numbers represent amounts and that these can change and counting helps us to recognise how many are in a set. We will use the 5 counting principles in a range of contexts to build our number knowledge and skills. This will be delivered through play songs and stories. Look out for our maths challenges delivered by the characters from Making Maths Magic!
We like to Spread the Happiness.
We are a Spread the Happiness accredited school which means all our Nursery staff are trained in delivering sessions around Dough Disco, Squiggle me into a Writer and Making Maths Magic. We firmly believe that these structures give all children the best start in life as well as having lots of fun! Look out for our challenges as there are lots of fun things to do before you turn 5!
A day in Nursery!
We start our session with a book vote deciding what we would like to read at story time followed by name recognition and self registration activity helping us to both recognise, read and write our names.
Then it is time to go to the Dough Disco! We splat, squeeze, poke and roll the dough to music to develop our fine motor skills and pencil grip but best of all it is great fun.
Next, we get into our key worker groups for a circle time. Each exciting activity is based on our topic of the week and incorporates Mathematics, Literacy and An Understanding of the World. They are creative and interactive and allow us to develop our social skills, self-confidence and communication and language skills.
At the end of our group session we Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle, to get our bodies ready for writing. First, we Wiggle and move to the music whilst making shapes in the air with our flipper flappers. Then we Squiggle using crayons, paint or chalk on paper and sometimes on the floor outside. We make, lines, circles, crosses, arches, all in practise for our early writing and pencil control. There are so many ways to squiggle and we LOVE all of them.
The next and most important part of our day is spent accessing our fantastic provision which has been carefully planned to suit the needs and interests of the children. We have areas for creativity and imagination to flourish through role play, art and design. We can develop scientific thinking and reasoning in our investigation area and develop mathematical awareness in our sand, water and maths areas. The outdoor provision will be open in all weathers so we have waterproofs and wellies available. We can challenge ourselves on balancing beams, build dens and explore the world around us; there are so many areas to explore with endless possibilities for learning.
Each child will have the opportunity to explore Forest School with a fully trained forest school practitioner once a week in our very own natural play space. We have newly planted trees, flowers and vegetables to look after and a bug hotel to attract lots of mini beasts and worms for us to observe.
Our maths sessions are delivered through the Making Maths Magic programme. We Make Maths Magic with number songs, number dances and number hunts. This enables us to look at numbers in the number system, shapes in the environment, patterns and problem solving.
We end our session with a story and Tiny Tweets, when we sing and sign lots of lovely songs with actions and dances as well.
Phew! And thats all in half a day. We repeat the same timetable in the afternoon and every day with different focuses and activities to ensure all children attending a range of sessions are given the same opportunities and experiences!
We also love to have a visit from Hamish, our school dog! Look how cute he is! He loves to play with us and listen to stories.