Nursery day
The Nursery at Cuddington offers a range of nursery sessions to suit all families' needs.
- Session 1: Monday and Tuesday 8:50 am - 2:50 pm and a Wednesday am 8:50 am - 11:50 am
- Session 2: Wednesday afternoon 11:50 am - 2:50 pm, Thursday and Friday 8:50 am - 2:50 pm
- 30 hours sessions are Monday to Friday 8:50 am - 2:50 pm
Session | Morning (am) | Afternoon (pm) | Full Time (FT) |
Start | 08:50am | 11.50pm | 08:50am |
Lunch | N/A | N/A | 11:30-12:00 |
Finish | 11:50am | 2.50pm | 2.50pm |
We understand that some families may need more of a flexible approach and as such we are able to consider individual requests for children who are funded for 15 hours to extend their sessions at an extra cost.
Arrival at Nursery
At the start of the nursery day, all children are met by our friendly nursery staff at the main playground gate. They will then be taken to the nursery classroom towards the back of the main school building where the staff will help them organise their belongings and settle in.
At the end of their session, the children will be dismissed by the nursery staff from the main playground gate. If you are late, please take your child to the main front office to sign them in. They will then be escorted to the nursery classroom by a member of staff.
Learning through play
Group activities
Throughout the week, the nursery children have a variety of fun and engaging whole class activities that include:
Dough disco: Dough disco involves moulding play dough in time to music and performing different actions such as rolling it into a ball, flattening it, putting each individual finger into the dough, rolling it into a sausage and squeezing. Children need to have strong muscles in their hands to enable them to write effectively. These exercises for the fingers to improve fine motor control and gross motor skills. Doing these simple, fun exercises they will help to strengthen your child’s hand to prepare them for writing.
Squiggle while you wiggle: Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle is a fun and engaging early writing program. Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle incorporates dance, music, and large movements to help children develop the fine muscle control they need for writing. They will learn a new gross motor movement to a piece of music while holding bits of fabric or pom poms while dancing along to the music. The children then transfer these movements to floor level and swap their material or pom poms for writing tools such as crayons, pens, chalk etc to make marks, this is done in foam, on paper, in sand etc. They will then use this action to think of letters they can form that use this shape. These sessions are great fun and also help your child to become confident mark makers.
Attention bucket: Attention and listening skills are a pre-requisite to language and development. Attention bucket helps develops joint attention, builds communication, interaction, listening and learning skills, by allowing children to opt in spontaneously rather than being pressured to communicate and learn. The ability to focus and sustain attention is critical for learning. The goals of the Attention bucket for the children are to engage attention, to improve joint attention, to develop shared enjoyment in adult led activities, to encourage spontaneous interaction in a natural group setting, to increase non-verbal and verbal communication through commentating, to build a wealth and depth of vocabulary and most importantly to have fun!
Phase 1 phonics: We have a fun and engaging phase 1 phonics where we Phase 1 phonics is the first stage of the phonics teaching programme. At this stage, the focus is primarily on developing speaking and listening skills. Speaking and listening are an important set of literacy skills that will create the foundation to a lot of your children's further learning. Listening requires the fundamental skill of focusing attention on the speaker to be able to hear and understand what the speaker is saying. Speaking skills require students to take turns, speak confidently, stay on topic, and speak with clarity. This is then continued within our continuous provision by integrating this into all areas of learning through our language-rich provision.
As a class we also enjoy visiting the library, are lucky enough to have access to the school field enjoying the trim trail and climbing frame and show and tell is a favourite where the children can talk and build confidence in front of the class.
Snack time
We have a rolling snack bar with access to milk and a selection of fruit that is available and open for the children to access throughout our morning from half nine until about 11 o clock. The children are given the opportunity to choose their snack and serve themselves. They are expected to sit down at the snack bar table, and it is a time to enjoy the opportunity to talk with a friend and a member of staff. All nursery-aged children are eligible for free school milk. Please visit the ‘Cool milk’ website to register for milk if you have not yet done so. www.coolmilk.com