Our youngest learners start at St Margaret’s in The Nursery, which is underpinned by the EYFS curriculum.

Our key resources in our planning are our individual children; we reflect on a child’s journey, are present with them in their learning, and support their next steps. We collectively plan various themes of learning with the children, and we believe that this instills a life-long love for learning.

The EYFS curriculum supports our belief that children’s cognitive development must go hand-in-hand with their social and personal development, this will ensure children are resilient lifelong learners.

The seven areas of learning that form the EYFS curriculum are personal, social and emotional development, communication and language, physical development, literacy, mathematics, understanding the world and expressive arts and design.

Our Nursery children also enjoy outdoor activities such as shelter building and woodland walks from our outdoor education Junior School wide curriculum.

Play and exploration are at the heart of our delivery, the children are happy, well cared for, and engaged in all that they do.

We encourage and promote the six effective learning characteristics; these include

• being willing to have a go
• being involved and focussed
• having their own ideas
• choosing ways to do things
• finding new ways of doing things
• enjoying achieving what they set out to do

We know that all children are unique and for some children in the Nursery they will need additional support. This additional learning support is put in place to ensure children reach their full potential. We use the EYFS Developmental Matters documentation to inform parents about individual children’s progress and attainment. In the Nursery, we also use a screening programme to ensure early identification of additional needs.

Language learning begins in The Nursery for both Nursery and Pre Reception children (Nursery). Through our Little Linguists Programme. Little Linguists is run by our own MFL teachers who work across the school and celebrate different languages and cultures, exploring new sounds and words through songs, games, poems and story-telling.

Our youngest children look forward with equal measure to our focused learning sessions alongside plenty of learning through play opportunities.