EYFS - Nursery

Nursery

Our nursery provides a home from home where your child's rights to create, play, explore, move, sing, discuss and communicate is embraced. Our highly qualified team have created a thoughtful and responsive curriculum and environment to enable your child to grow and make independent steps in their lifelong learning journey.

We focus on building strong foundations and connections by listening, communicating, investigating, sharing and collaborating with one another. We celebrate everyone's achievements and place the children's sense of belonging and learning at the centre of everything we do.

Children start in Nursery the term after they have turned 3. There are two sessions at nursery each day, morning and afternoon. This is 15 hours per week. To join Lakenham in Nursery are through the school - application for Nursery.

From September 2025, 30 hours and 15 hours funded and paid access to Nursery will be available.

Information about starting at our school

Nursery Admission Policy - up till July 2026

Nursery Charging Policy - up till July 2026

Nursery Complaints Policy - Up till July 2026

See the page EYFS - Reception and Nursery to understand how some of the specific learning takes place.

Our Nursery

We have an intentionally designed environment that offers children open-ended learning experiences and real materials to imagine, re-imagine, challenge and build upon their knowledge and thinking.

Children are given time to move freely between our indoor and outdoor provisions to find a space where they can become immersed and focus their energy in their interests or experience an intentional provocation provided by the teachers.

Our text-rich environment is a powerful tool for social/emotional learning, language acquisition as well as early maths and literacy skills.

Our Daily Routine

Am Drop off at 8.45 - 9 am Pm Drop off 12.30-12.45 pm
Children settle followed by circle time - a time to gather and greet
Small groups - time to make connections together
Choose our learning both inside and outside / Snack (provided by the school)
Put things back where they belong - respecting their environment
End of session carpet time - reflection of their learning or a maths/enquiry lens
Stories and songs followed by home time
Am - 11.45 am, Pm 3.30 pm

Continuous Provision

Each and every part of our environment has been carefully planned to support children's development within Nursery and provide them with opportunities to demonstrate the Characteristics of Effective Learning. Our environment consists of many different areas of 'continuous provision'. Continuous provision is the areas and resources which are always there for the children to explore, it is planned to be stimulating, engaging, purposeful and challenging. Our provision enables children to make choices and learn through child-initiated play. The provision is enhanced daily through 'set ups' which are linked directly to children's personalised next steps to enable strong learning and progress from all.

Assessment

We use a combination of teacher expertise, observations, pupil voice and parental voice to build a whole picture of the child's capabilities.

A rich picture of each child is built up over time across the seven areas of learning and development and we use the information to plan their next steps and inform our practice and provision. Each child is continuously assessed and any areas for development are addressed as the year progresses.

Tapestry

We use the online platform Tapestry to record our observations of individual children and also to support our ongoing assessments. We share our observations with families for each child within early years. Families are then able to see their child’s learning and development and talk about it with their child. You can also add comments to anything we upload and also upload any home learning or out of school experiences or achievements that your child may like to share with us. We will support you with setting up an account and accessing the observations.

Key Person System

We operate a key person system in which each member of early years staff has responsibility for a key group of children during their time in Nursery. Your child will be assigned a key person who will work closely with them to ensure they feel safe and cared for, support their learning and development and build a close relationship with yourself and your child.

Becoming a reader

We want every child to develop a love of stories and books and so provide a wide range of books in our classroom. We have dedicated, comfortable reading spaces as well as integrating books into many different areas of provision. Stories are shared with children on a daily basis.

Their understanding of phonics is built on the strong foundations that are established in Nursery and followed through into Reception. We use FFT phonics which is a DFE recognised phonics scheme which introduces the children to all the sounds they need to learn to be able to become a confident, fluent reader.

Becoming a writer

Writing is a complex skill that takes several years to master and refine. It is vital that children develop all the large muscles in their body through crawling, climbing, jumping, balancing, sliding, running etc and so we provide many opportunities for them to develop their physical strength and stamina.

They also need to develop good hand-eye coordination, a pincer grip and other fine motor skills and so in school they will have many opportunities to

use scissors
use tools for woodwork
use a wide range of mark making resources - pens, pencils, paintbrushes, felt tips, chalks etc.
use construction kits such as Lego and Knex
play regularly with playdough, mud and clay
manipulate cutlery and cooking utensils

Learning at Home

We love to share and celebrate children's learning and achievements both in and out of school. Please use your child's Tapestry account to share any learning at home with us, this may be photos, videos or a brief description of what they have done.