What does your child learn at nursery?
What Children Learn at Nursery?
What does a child learn in nursery? It's an interesting question; one that the answer can vary drastically depending on what kind of facility your child is at. Most nursery and pre-school sites will follow the same (or similar) basis for a development plan across the years your children are with them, with each site choosing to go more in depth at their own discretion.
It's natural for parents to want to understand what their children at doing with us. We'd want that too! Between he ages of 2-5, it's a critically important time for children's development and they begin to pick up some of the most basic skills - which lay the foundations for further education at school going forward. Most learning is mainly through play-based activities, but it's important to offer pre-schoolers every opportunity to develop their early literacy, maths, motor and social skills.
That's why we wanted to bring you full transparency about what we do for your child's development, how we come to know what areas to focus on, how we use worldly events to influence that and our curriculum planning process. Sound useful or interesting? Keep reading to learn more!
Want to jump ahead?
Why Is Early Years Development Is Important At This Age?
"Early Years Development is Important". That might seem like a very obvious sentence, one that you don't need reminding of. However, it's the context on why their development is so critical. From starting in a nursery setting, to their first day at primary/junior school, there's a lot to learn. Beyond the academic strides that little ones make, they also need to develop a level of independence in themselves.
Early Years settings, just like our site in Winchester, focus on improving the hard skills - opening and closing all items in their lunches, ability to hold a pen correctly and effectively, communicate with adults - just to name a few, there's a lot of skills that are necessary to learn before you even step foot into a school.
As we mentioned prior, depending on the facility you send your child to, there will be a different level of priority on their education. In nurseries and pre-schools like Dungaroos, education comes first. Whereas if you opt for childminding or babysitters, the chances of high-level education are lesser (generally speaking!!)
The point being, if you want to send your child to the best schools with the best pre-existing knowledge and skills they need to truly succeed, you need to invest in that education early. There's efforts you can make to supplement their education too, which we'll discuss later in this post!
What Are The 5 Main Areas of Development?
The early year's development curriculum focuses on 5 main areas of development, which molds the foundations for your child as they head into their journey at school. These 5 main areas are:
- Gross Motor Skills; walking, running, jumping, crawling
- Fine Motor Skills; handwriting, colouring, drawing
- Speech and Language; forming sentences, correct pronunciation, manners
- Cognitive and Intellectual; counting, identifying shapes and colours, problem solving
- Social and Emotional Skills; playing with other children, empathy, building relationships
What Can You Do To Help?
Despite what we have emphasised so far, a child's development is far from over when the leave our nursery. Children require consistency to learn. Without your help in drilling down on these main 5 areas of development, it will be difficult for your little ones to retain their learning.
One of the easiest ways you can supplement our teachings is by asking questions; be curious and allow them to think about their answers. If you're reading a book with them, allow them to try and name how many animals are on the page, or even read sentences themselves (at later stages). If they're playing with toys, engage with them - ask why they're doing what they're doing, how they might feel.
Giving them the independence to answer your questions, and recall their learning is a sure-fire way to retain that knowledge.
If you'd like to know the main specifics about your child's development progress, and where could use more information, contact your nursery manager and they should have a record! At Dungaroos, you can email julie@dungaroos.uk and she can provide that for you!
How Do We Create Our Curriculum?
The fundamentals of creating a curriculum for early year's children is understanding the 5 main areas of focus. Using this knowledge, our Deputy Manager, Emily Bennett, worked to create a year-round plan for different topics, themes and days to be aware of - all of which fit at least one of our areas.
Here's what she said...
"One of the main reasons for creating our year of planned out themes and dates was to bring full transparency to everyone. We made sure that all parents and staff know what's going on in the nursery all the time.
That transparency brings a level of parental involvement that we love. For us, we know that if a parent is aware of what we're doing, they're more likely to continue the conversations and learning outside of nursery too.
It's all about the collaboration in making the most out of a child's most impressionable years"
If you've found value in delving into our innovative early years' education approach, we invite you to delve even deeper into our wealth of informative blogs below.
And if you're not currently a part of the Dungaroos community but are intrigued by our offerings or considering joining our waiting list, don't hesitate to get in touch with us today.
