Waingels Gardens Day Nursery, Waingels college, Waingels Road, Woodley, Reading RG5 4RF Telephone: 0118 918 6060 Email: [email protected]

Our Ethos

The Prime Areas

The Specific Areas

The Specific Areas:

LITERACY

To help each child in our care to develop their Literacy skills, we will support them:

To develop a life-long love of reading.
To have access to a literacy rich environment
To experience the pleasure of shared story/reading time.
To access a range of texts for themselves.
To explore mark making tools in a range of exciting ways.
To explore the purpose of print.
To understand how to handle books and resources with respect.
To develop an understanding of story structure.
To use and develop their imaginative/role play skills.
To experiment with sounds, words and rhymes.
To become a good conversational partner.
To continue to develop their vocabulary and their understanding of how sentences are constructed.

Children learn a great deal about books, words, print and writing well before they start formal schooling. But what they learn and the depth of their understanding is rooted in what adults do and provide. Literacy-rich environments demonstrate how literacy is used in everyday life; by adults modelling reading and writing for different purposes, demonstrating the language used for thinking and helping children to share an understanding of a variety of books and print through talk, we will help children to gain a better grasp of the importance of literacy in our everyday lives.

MATHEMATICS

To help each child in our care to develop their Mathematical skills, we will support them:

To incorporate mathematical language, concepts and number operation into play.
To use maths to solve problems.
To explore and experiment with mathematical language, concepts and strategies.
To experiment, estimate and predict with growing accuracy.
To start to recognise how maths supports us in our everyday lives.

Maths forms a huge part of our everyday lives – from finding the right house number when going somewhere new to knowing how much money we have left after we’ve been shopping. Even the simplest tasks such as estimating how much water we need to put in our bath or measuring a space in our bedroom to see if a new piece of furniture will fit are dominated by our ability to apply some aspect of maths. By using number, simple addition and subtraction, the use of shape, space and measure in everyday situations, children will start to develop an understanding of number, capacity, quantity, and develop the vocabulary to use maths to solve problems.

UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD

To help each child in our care to develop their Understanding of the world, we will support them:

To understand and appreciate their local community.
To recognise and celebrate our individual differences.
To learn how to care for our environment and living things.
To start to understand some of the interesting things about communities beyond our own.
To experience the elements.
To confidently explore and investigate the natural world.
To understand that people may have different views and opinions to our own and that these need to be respected.
To show curiosity about the wider world.

It is important that children grow up in environments where adults understand and respect individuality and what makes us unique so that our children can go out into the world with a mindset of acceptance, respect and inclusivity. To do this, we need to build on what children know and understand (their home environment) and help them to make connections by then introducing them to our community and the world beyond.

EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND DESIGN

To help each child in our care to develop their Expressive arts and design skills, we will support them:

To experiment, explore and investigate creative media.
To take pride in their own work and creations.
To learn to plan things out so that they can execute their ideas.
To use their senses to explore different aspects of their world.
To use their imagination to mirror, create and rehearse.
To express their ideas and thoughts through a range of different creative media.

It is through creative, dramatic, exploratory, imaginary, object, recapitulative, role, rough and tumble, social and symbolic play that children start to understand how the world works and to make meaning and connections for themselves. This requires environments that provide a broad and balanced set of opportunities, experiences, provocations and invitations which include music, movement, dance, art, craft, technology, nature, the world outside of nursery, construction, small world, sand, water, role play, cookery, book and rhymes sharing etc.

We believe that a broad and balanced approach will:

help practitioners to tune into children’s interests,
support the development of cultural capital,
encourage children to try new experiences and to start to form opinions about what they like and don’t like,
encourage children to develop their own ideas/hypotheses, and to create and carry out their plans,
help children to make connections and to find the answers to their problems.

About

Waingels Gardens Day Nursery is part of The Forbury Group of Nurseries, established in 1991. Our other nurseries are situated in Reading and surrounding areas; Forbury Gardens, Berkeley Gardens, Woodley Gardens and Newbury Gardens. We offer full and part time places to children from 3 months old up to the age of 5 years. We are situated in a purpose built building adjacent to Waingels Copse College, Waingels Road.

We will provide a high standard of healthy meals using quality ingredients. Your child will receive a two course lunch and snacks using fresh ingredients. We aim to introduce the children to different tastes and textures whilst encouraging good manners and a happy atmosphere when we sit down for meal times.

Welfare

We consider health and safety of each child of upmost importance and each child is allocated a ‘key person’ when they first start at the Nursery. This ‘key person’ will ensure that your child feels individually cared for. Children’s meals are cooked on site every day by our qualified cook. We use fresh fruit and vegetables and source meat locally. We cater for all allergies and dietary requirements.