St Mary's preschool
To fulfil their potential, every child needs a caring and stimulating environment in their early years but providing this can be very demanding on parents, especially if they are working.
Our experienced and dedicated childcare team here at St Mary's Preschool will do all they can to give your children the best possible start in life.
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When a child is well cared for, is enjoying activities and making friends, they are best placed to build the knowledge, skills, and confidence to do well in the future. St Mary’s preschool (for children aged between two and four) provides the foundation for learning – socially as well as academically – that will help your child succeed in ‘junior’ school. Our parents want the best for their children and want them to fulfil their potential, whatever that might be.
That’s why our nursery programme has been developed to:
Provide a bridge between home and school
Enable each child to develop the skills needed for the next stage of their schooling
Encourage social interaction, creativity and curiosity in a happy, safe and stimulating environment
Encourage the development of independence
Explore our pages to find out about our education programme, how you can apply, read stories of past parents and families and much more.
Preschool programme
At St Mary’s preschool, we know that to provide the best for your children, we need to work in partnership with you, the parents. From you, we learn anything that might help us to better care for your child and how to ensure they engage in our activities and settle quickly. To do this, we nominate a key person as your individual contact. This person will make sure that, within the day-to-day routine, each child feels individual, cherished and thought about whilst they are away from home – that person will be your point of contact to identify any concerns about your child.
Day to day
For many children, our nursery will be their first experience of a structured setting with carers or teachers and groups of other children. It’s a huge opportunity for children to learn to share and follow instructions but it can be confusing.
At St Mary’s preschool, we understand how children develop and learn and have developed a programme of activities, indoors and outdoors, individual and group to encourage children to explore individually or in a group with their friends. Every morning, the room is set up with a range of activities to encourage all our children to explore something new.
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Every day, parents will receive information from their key person about their child’s day. If there is a problem resulting from family circumstances, we can work with you to address any issues, such as we found with Leyla’s Story to help her and her family cope with their grief. Or with Cece's Story who had an abusive partner and whose past relationship was affecting her daughter.
These are extreme situations but it’s important to know that, at St Mary’s preschool, you are not alone in helping to give your child a springboard to the next few years.
The plan of activities is posted for each week on our noticeboard in the preschool room. Through the session planning, we ensure that Early Learning Goals are covered as part of the Early Years Foundation stage – following the government curriculum.
Parents are able to download our assessment app, Blossoms, to keep up to date with their child's progress and be a part of the planning cycle.
Use this link to get more information on how to use the parent app.
Key themes
A structured environment helps young children learn to make friends and play well with others. This doesn’t mean there are lots of rules or that adults constantly direct children’s activities. On the contrary, the structure is largely invisible to children. All our space is organised to encourage social interaction and creativity and minimise congestion and conflicts.
Young children learn social and emotional skills through experiences - and our carers/teachers make time for those moments when they can help children learn to manage frustrations or anger. At St Mary’s preschool, we know how important it is for children to notice the effect their behaviour has on other children.
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And we know how important ‘play time’ is in feeding curiosity and imagination. For example, a ‘pretend shop’ can help children to practise many social and cognitive skills as they assign roles to each other, figure out categories of different products and how to organise them, make signs to label them; help their ‘customers’ to select what they need, and take ‘money’ for merchandise.
As for independence, at St Mary’s preschool, we know that our children’s sense of self-worth grows as they learn to take care of themselves and help others. Each of our children has an individual coat hook where they keep their outdoor things; each is offered chances to help out in the nursery; each is expected to put away toys before moving to a new activity; each can choose from a varied range of focused activities, some of which are differentiated by age and ability, which is particularly important for children preparing to enter Reception classes. Our young children are on the move for a good part of the day; running, climbing, playing games - activities to build their hand-eye coordination and balance.
