Nursery Curriculum

The curriculum that we offer our children is diverse and supports children with all of their passions within learning. We want to offer as many opportunities and experiences to our learners so have a inquiry based approach to learning. This approach has been designed to support development matters as it provides opportunities to develop all areas of learning. 

To build on the children inquiry learning, they will have inquiry time which is child initiated time throughout the day. We want the children to take ownership over their learning so they will be able to choose their learning with their peers and access activities that extends their understanding from the carpet sessions.  

The Academy has adopted the Read Write Inc. (RWI) phonics programme of study to teach our children the fundamental skills in learning to read. We will be starting RWI with Nursery children during the Summer term. However, we do play lots of phonics games throughout the year to develop their oral blending and segmenting skills, to identify rhyming words, to identify environmental sounds and to listen to stories and rhymes. 

Inquiry learning 

Over the year we will be exploring a variety of big ideas and will do this through explicit lessons and throughout our continuous provision while children are learning through play. We are choosing to explore big ideas as we want to keep it open ended so children can take agency over their learning and follow their own interests. Throughout each big idea we will explore a range of different core texts to build on our knowledge and to challenge our thinking. These texts are a variety of fiction and non-fiction books, diverse and offer culture capital. We will be exploring 5 different big ideas throughout the year; 

• Term 1-  Our characteristics, interests, experiences and families make us who we are. 
• Term 2-  Families and communities coming together to celebrate at different times of the year.
• Term 3 and Term 4-  Different forms of transport can take us on many different journeys and keep us connected to others. 
• Term 5-  The Earth’s natural cycles affect living things. 
• Term 6-  Sharing feelings helps us better understand ourselves and others.

Rhythm of the day for Nursery

• 8:40am-8:55am Children come in through the Nursery gate. When children come in they can choose their learning straight away
• 8:55am-9:10am Inquiry learning 
• 9:10am-10:00am Child initiated inquiry time
• 10:00am-10:10am whole class maths session
• 10:10am-11:00am child initiated inquiry time 
• 11:00am-11:10am phonics/listening games
• 11:10am-11:20am doh disco/squiggle whilst you wiggle
• 11:20am-11:30am Story time and whole class snack for Term 1.
• 11:30-11:45 getting ready for home and singing
• 11:45am Home time! Please collect from the Nursery gate. Mrs Sandhu will call your child over to you. Please make sure you are on time!