Merton Bank Primary School

'Never less than our best'

Merton Bank Primary School, Roper Street, St Helens, Merseyside, WA9 1EJ

0174422104

mertonbank@sthelens.org.uk

Welcome to Nursery

           Caring          Respect          Empathy          Courage          Resilience           

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Our Nursery environment promotes curiosity and an excitement to explore! We offer children a wide variety of multi-sensory activities through quality indoor and outdoor learning experiences and opportunities. Our nurturing approach supports the well-being and emotional development of all children, ensuring every child feels happy, safe and confident. Our Curriculum is based around the understanding that children learn best through play and active learning. We have termly plans which show ‘Loose themes’ we will be working on throughout the year. Our planning is always centred around a high quality text. However, it is important to note that we also follow the interests of the children. Often, the direction for our continuous provision planning can happen in the moment. We believe that children will become more absorbed in their learning if they are excited and engaged by the content. 

In Merton Bank Nursery, we are on the journey to achieve our Curiosity Approach Accreditation.

This means that the Nursery team are making changes to the environment, our resources and our way of learning to reflect all things curious and magical!

 

We began our Curiosity Approach Accreditation journey in January 2023. We have made some wonderful changes with our Nursery environment which
have already made such a huge impact on the atmosphere and opportunities for learning.

Authentic resources, learning through play, loose parts and real life experiences are vital for our curiosity journey. 

Our Curriculum

 It is so important that we develop opportunities for effective communication and language through our play and activities in Nursery. We start our days with 'talking tables' where an adult will lead a conversation or pass around an object or picture linked to a theme and model high quality vocabulary and sentence structures. Throughout the day, children are encouraged to communicate with each other through play, challenges and adult lead activities. 
 

In Nursery we enjoy both guided mark making and taking part in Scribble Club.
Scribble Club, by Greg Botril, is encouraging the joy of mark making through
co-play. Scribble Club involves mark making in immersive play, mark making for a purpose and mark making for fun!

In Nursery our curriculum is driven by reading beautiful books. Our core texts drive our learning journey and help the children to become confident with retelling familiar stories.

 

Maths

In Maths we are learning about shapes. Here are lots of examples of our learning all about circles. We explored circles in nature, how to draw circles with lots of different materials, conducted circle treasure hunts, and used clay and handpicked sunflower seeds to create our own circle art work inspired by sunflowers.

We spend a lot of time in Nursery becoming secure with numbers, we really take time to explore what makes a number, how to write it, what it looks like in different forms, pictures and building amounts in many different ways.

General Information

Times of the school day

Doors open 8:45am, registration closes at 8.55am.  Your child must be in school by 8.55am.

The nursery session ends at 11.45am

Your child will enter and leave school via the Merton Bank Road Nursery gate.

 

 

Daily Routine

In Nursery, we are building up our stamina for learning, building an exciting and purposeful routine allows children to develop their skills ready to continue their Early Years journey into Reception. We come in to Nursery and sit at 'talking tables' where we have discussions around themes with the option of enjoying toast for breakfast, followed by structured short learning sessions as a whole class and in groups. Then children explore well thought out continuous provision areas both inside and outside for even more adventures. After tidy up time, we then sit at talking tables again to enjoy milk and a fruit snack before we join together again for further whole class learning sessions, singing, stories and calm down sensory time before we are collected by our families.

 

Collecting your child

Please queue by the fence opposite the front door to collect your child from the Nursery entrance, where you will be greeted by a member of the Nursery team. Safeguarding is high priority at Merton Bank so please understand we may need to check if someone else is picking your child up.  Please always inform the office if someone new is collecting.  Thank you for your understanding with this.

 

What a Nursery child needs

Black joggers, black leggings or black shorts with a white polo top and a blue school jumper or sweatshirt. Shoes should be comfortable, practical and ideally velcro so children can develop the skills of independently dressing. Please note that Nursery children will have sessions outdoors in all weathers and we provide waterproof suits and boots.
School provides all children with a school water bottle. Nursery staff attach a photograph of each child to easily identify their own bottle.
All children need a full set of spare clothes including socks and underwear, getting messy is all part of our learning journey!

 

Parental Engagement

In Nursery we regularly update children's Tapestry accounts with observations of their learning at school. We ask all families to engage with these posts and to send their own observations of learning and experiences from home. Please speak to a member of the Nursery team if you have any difficulties accessing your child's Tapestry account.

'Stay and play' workshops will be held once a half term, these will be offered currently to one family member per child due to the space in the Nursery and the sessions will have a new focus each time with activities and ideas to take away and try at home.

 

We are delighted to share with you our Autumn Term book list....enjoy!

Autumn 1 2024 Learning Overview

Take a look at some of the exciting learning during Autumn Term 2024

Take a look at some of the exciting learning in Nursery during 2023/2024

Click on a photograph above to see the enlarged image.

We have had so much fun in Nursery Autumn 2023, some of our favourites were definitely conker rolling, exploring loose parts play, making playdough, writing numbers, reading stories, exploring exciting adventures inside and outside, jumping in autumn leaves and of course we all love splashing in muddy puddles!

Take a look at some of the exciting learning in Nursery during Spring Term 2024

The photographs above show some of our outdoor learning. In Nursery this Spring, outdoor learning has already consisted of so much fun, we love being able to refine our gross motor skills and physical development - climbing, sliding, running, jumping, mixing and building!

The photographs above show our love of reading. In Nursery this Spring we have read some lovely books, the photographs show some of our adult and child initiated learning based on The Gingerbread Man, Trains Trains Trains and The Runaway Pancake! 

The photographs above show just a few glimpses of our Maths learning. In Nursery this Spring we have really been developing our number and counting skills, recognising amounts of objects, counting objects by lining them up, counting fixed objects by touch counting, making shapes, recognising patterns and making new shapes by joining more than one shape together!

Take a look at some of the exciting learning in Nursery during Summer Term 2024

Family Nursery Workshop - We enjoyed a Nature workshop where we explored different areas of learning whilst using natural objects. We made number bugs with the correct amount of sticks for their legs, we explored the patterns and textures created when we painted with natural paintbrushes made from leaves, we made sun catchers, collected flowers for cardboard vases and even made playdough emotion faces using pebbles, shells, sticks, flowers and leaves. 

Maths - Children have enjoyed exploring larger loose parts using the vocabulary bigger, smaller, taller, shorter. We explored how to put them in order from the shortest to the tallest, we compared them with our own heights and worked together to build taller stuctures with resilience.