Curriculum

We follow the EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) framework.  This sets the standards for all early years settings to follow to ensure children learn and develop well.  Our curriculum is what we want our children to learn, at Bluebell we have also added and developed this creating our very own Bluebell way of teaching the children.  We take inspiration from early years theorists such as Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, Emmi Pikler, Loris Malaguzzi and Te Whariki, which is the curriculum for early childhood in New Zealand.  How we teach the curriculum to the children is our pedagogy, this is the child centred approach we use to foster a love of learning, curiosity, and awe and wonder.  We are also working towards the curiosity approach accreditation.

Forest School

We are a Forest School Nursery, each week our pre school children go out to the forest with their teachers and our forest school leader to explore the local park and woodland.  We go out every week throughout the whole year, so the children can see and learn about the changes to the trees and the environment during the different seasons.  They learn to identify different trees, birds and minibeasts.  They learn how to look after our green spaces, we always take everything we have brough with us back to nursery and leave the woods as we found it.

The children learn how to keep themselves safe around dogs, and how to be safe in the woods by playing games like, ‘duck, duck, goose’ and ‘one, two three, where are you?’.  Children are encouraged to risk assess their own play in the woods, when they climb trees, they have to be able to get themselves down safely.  They use mallets to create pictures on muslin cloths by squishing berries and leaves.

We light a fire so the children can eat in the forest and have a warm drink when it is cold.  We delimit our forest school play area with a boundary rope, and the children know not to go outside of that boundary.

At the end of every forest school session, we sit together, and each child gets a turn of holding the ‘talking stick’ so they can share, if they want to, what their favourite part of the session was.

Our mission statement was written in the form of a poem by our amazing staff team: