Welcome to our Nursery page!

Introduction

Ashmead Nursery offers a caring, exciting and engaging childcare environment for children aged 2 to 4yrs. We are able to offer the following sessions:

8:45 to 11.45am Monday to Friday (morning session)

12.15 to 3.15pm Monday to Friday (afternoon session)

The sessions offered are term time only.

We have a small number of places for government funded 2 year old children; all other children will be eligible to start Nursery the term after they turn three. We offer the government funded sessions of 15hrs a week for these children too.

Depending on your circumstances you may qualify for 30 hours funding which would enable your child to attend full days  (a lunch cover fee may be payable). The hours your child could attend are 8.45 - 2.45pm / 9.15-3.15pm (no lunch cover fee payable) or 8.45 - 3.15pm (a lunch cover fee is payable; contact the school office for more details)

To check your eligibility and for more information on the options available to you please check the Government website: https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk/

Admissions

We are now accepting admissions for our Nursery. Places are limited and fill up fast so get in touch as soon as possible to secure your child's place on our waiting list.

If you would like to register your child for our Nursery, please complete a registration form and return it to either the Nursery or school office,  in person or by email to office@ashmeadschool.org.uk. Registration forms can be collected from the school office, Nursery or found below.

We hope to see you soon!

Funded places for children from 2 to 4 years old.

We offer a wide and varied curriculum based around the 7 Areas of Learning linked to the Early Years Foundation Stage.

The three Prime Areas of learning  are Personal, Social and Emotional development, Communication and Language and Physical Development. The four Specific Areas of learning that run alongside the Prime Areas are Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding of the World and Expressive Arts and Design.

Our environment and staff interaction ensures the children develop to the best of their ability in these key areas of learning. We strive to ensure that at all times we offer a curriculum that is exciting and fun and one that will reflect the school's ethos of learning through experience.

Our Nursery environment 

We work hard to make sure our Nursery environment is an exciting and engaging place for our children to be. We make certain there are many opportunities for the development of children's language and communication skills alongside the development of their natural curiosity, inquisitiveness and imagination.

Weekly round-ups

Weekly round up 26th April 2024

This week we focussed on the lifecycle of the butterfly and talked about the changes the caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly. The children did really well remembering the lifecycle order and what the different parts of the lifecycle are named, we introduced the word cocoon, chrysalis and pupae. On Tuesday we tasted some of the different fruits the caterpillar munched through in the story and had a chance to look closely at the caterpillars. We will be watching what happens to them over the coming weeks.

Weekly round up 19th April 2024

This week we have been reading The Hungry Caterpillar and made some repeated patterns with gummed circles in 2 (or 3) colours, we talked about all the different food the caterpillar ate and drew lots of the food, choosing which media we wanted to use.

Weekly round up 27th March 2024
What a great end to the Spring term, a party and parents’ nursery rhyme time! 
This week we continued to find out about Eid, made some beautiful Eid cards and had an Eid party which was great fun. 

Weekly round up 22nd March 2024

This week we have been reading The Gingerbread Man together and doing lots of activities linked to the story. We looked at and smelt ginger root, it was quite large, we had play dough that had ginger in it to play with and used cutters to make lots of gingerbread men. We also made our own gingerbread men out of collage, some of the children drew round a template and some chose to draw him.
On Thursday we baked gingerbread men to take home and drew the route the gingerbread man took while he ran away.
 

Weekly round up 15th March 2024

The children looked at, talked about and tasted different types of bread, a great way to start the week. We  continued to read the story of The Little Red Hen,  talked about how helpful we can be,  had the opportunity to make paper plate faces of the other story characters, found out how flour is made and baked rolls to take home.
 We also made windmills and built with lots of boxes etc.
 

Science fun

We had a lot of fun doing lots of different experiments as a link to Science week at school.
We made ‘moon sand’ out of oil and flour, watched and felt what happened when we added fizzing vitamin c tablets to warm water, mixed vinegar, baking soda and food colouring and saw lots of bubbles and more fizz and made a rainbow with skittles and milk.

In group time we spoke about why yeast is important when we make bread (a link to our story of The Little Red Hen) and saw what happened when we added it to warm water and sugar, we had to wait a while…

Weekly round up 8th March

This week we have been reading the story of The Little Red Hen and talking about how we can help people and what we could have done to help the Little Red Hen. We talked about what the hen looked like and made our own red hen using our handprint and collage materials and drew our own story maps, we also made paper plate faces of the other story characters.

You can see Mr Tumble tell the story of The Little Red Hen at https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09y0rxx/mr-tumble-tales-little-red-hen

Our oracy word of the week was MOST.

Weekly round up 1st March

The learning aim of the week was to be able to talk about the different parts of the story Goldilocks and the 3 Bears and especially about the children's favourite part.
We continued to act out the story using character puppets and following on from last week when we compared and ordered objects from the biggest / largest to the smallest and used the word 'medium' to describe the middle sized object, we ordered pictures of objects matching them to Daddy, Mummy and Baby bear.

We had porridge for snack again and made a tally chart of which toppings we chose to have, syrup and honey were the favourite toppings.

Our oracy word of the week was BEFORE, which fitted really well with this week’s story. We have been talked about what happened BEFORE eg Baby Bear's chair broke.

Weekly round up 23rd February 

The learning aim of the week was to be able to talk about the key features of the story Goldilocks and the 3 Bears.
We retold the story using character puppets and discussed the emotion 'cross / angry' while talking about how the bears might have felt when they returned from their walk and saw the eaten porridge and broken chair. We spoke about what makes us cross and how we can make ourselves feel calmer.
During the week we also compared and ordered objects from the biggest / largest to the smallest and used the word 'medium' to describe the middle sized object.

We also tasted porridge. 
 

Our oracy word of the week was SIZE, which fitted really well with this week’s story. 

Weekly round up 9th February 

This week have been reading and doing activities linked to the story of The Elves and the Shoemaker; we decorated shoes, had a great time trying on and walking in different shoes and we matched pairs of gloves, socks and pictures.
We visited the main school to see if we could find where the elves had hidden themselves and around the nursery found objects that were shorter and longer than our feet.
Our learning aim was for the children to be able to compare objects by length.

Our oracy word of the week was PAIR, which fitted really well with this week’s story.

Weekly round up 2nd February 

This week we have continued reading The Enormous Turnip and doing lots of activities based around the story. Our learning aim was for the children to understand and use ordinal numbers 1st, 2nd, 3rd while ordering characters in the story.

We have been drawing the characters in the story, printed simple patterns using vegetables and explored printing with vegetables in different ways.

Our Oracy word of the week has been NEXT. 

Weekly round up 26th January 

This week we have been reading The Enormous Turnip and doing lots of activities based around the story. Our learning aim was for the children to explain how they have ordered objects (it could be by size, but any way they would like to).

We have looked at turnips as lots of the children were unsure what one looked like and had a go at drawing them, we also ordered turnips by size and used different descriptive language of size eg small, big, huge, ENORMOUS.
We have begun to use ordinal language 1st, 2nd and 3rd when talking about the characters who helped to pull up the turnip.

Weekly round up 19th January 

We have had another fun week taking part in activities focussed around The 3 Little Pigs.
We have been doing a lot of house building using junk modelling and large bricks outside, we have been ordering the story and acting it out together and we have been painting and drawing characters and scenes from the story.

Weekly round up 12th January

This week has been full of storytelling! We have started reading the Three Little Pigs and the children have been brilliant at joining in and retelling the story, thinking about the characters, giving them names and talking about what happened next. We have been exploring the different materials the pigs used to build their houses. We have been using lots of related words such as “strong” and “hard”.
We built houses out of straw, sticks and bricks for the pigs and tried to blow them down just like the Big Bad Wolf. We also thought about how the big bad wood could have knocked down the brick house, one of the children suggested a cannon ball 😆
We have also been colour mixing pink for the 3 pigs and painting different shades of pink on paper plates.

Weekly round up Friday 24th November

This week the learning aim was for the children to be able to talk about who is in their family and to understand that every family is different. We have also been finding out about what makes us happy and what our face looks like when we are happy. Our learning aim was to understand the emotion of ‘happy’.
We also spoke about what makes us a good friend and came up with LOTS of good ideas.

The children had the opportunity to draw their family using chalk, colouring pencils and paint. We looked at pictures of family characters and made playdough people.

Weekly round up Friday 17th November

This week the learning aim was for the children to understand the key points of an invitation and to develop an understanding of patterning. The children decorated  invitations and had a go at mark making their names and who the invitation was to.

We practised patterning using pom poms, threading, using multi link and by printing , we started by making a repeating pattern using 2 colours, some children tried a pattern with 3 colours.

We spoke about how we can be helpful at home and school and drew pictures of us being helpful on some BIG paper. We continued to look at all things autumnal too.

Weekly round up Friday 10th November

This week was all about fireworks and Diwali. We watched a firework video and spoke about the different patterns in the sky and the sound of the fireworks; we had the opportunity to make firework pictures, sparkling rockets and sparklers and made rockets out of stickle bricks.
Later in the week we found out about Diwali, Priti spoke to us about the festival of Diwali and why Diwa pots are so important, we could then decorate our own Diwa pots which we took home (we hope you like them, they were made of salt dough so it is safe to light the tea light). On Thursday we ate vegetable rice and chapatis.

Weekly round up Friday 3rd November

The learning aim this week was for the children to find out more about pumpkins, the colour orange and 2D shapes.
The children ordered different pumpkins and talked about why they ordered them in a particular way, later in the week the children looked inside the pumpkins and used some great descriptive language, we hope to plant some of the seeds to see what happens.

We had a great time mixing red and yellow to make orange in shaving foam and printing on pumpkin shapes. We also spoke about 2D shapes and had the opportunity to make some great 2D pictures.

Weekly round up Friday 20th October

This week, amazingly, was the last week of the half term and what a great half term it has been!

The learning aim was for the children to find out more about their senses and to understand what we use them for. We began the week by using our sense of hearing and went on a listening walk in the outside area. We also explored our sense of touch by finding out what different objects felt like in the feely bags and using language like 'rough' and 'smooth' to describe them.
The children also explored scent pots and we tried to think of lots of different words to describe the different smells and had the opportunity to make 'sense pictures' with objects that smelt and had different textures.

Weekly round up Friday 13th October

This week the learning aim was for the children to name and describe their facial features. We spoke about how many eg. eyes we have and where they are on our face, what they look like and how our features may look different or the same as our friends. We drew pictures of our faces, made playdough faces, potato head faces and faces out of conkers.
The funky finger activity at the start of the session this week was the spinning tops, by the end of the week lots of the children were getting VERY good at getting the tops to spin for quite a while!
We had a great time looking at the conkers and made some 'thunder' sounds by shaking them in cups and pouring them into different boxes, the children recognised how the sounds changed.
 

Weekly round up Friday 6th October

This week our extended focus has been on number with a close look at the number that represents the children's age, we have been matching numbers, choosing the correct number to represent a digit and have sung lots of number songs.
The children had a great time developing strength in their hands with the funky finger activity which was trying to get the bouncy frogs to land on their lilypads.

Weekly round up Friday 29th September

This week the children have been getting used to group time at the start and the end of the session, they have been self registering by finding their names when they arrive and putting them up in their key area. We have been talking a lot about our name and who is in our group, we have been listening closely to the starting sound of our name and to the starting sound of the name of the children in our key group. We have been strengthening our hands and developing our fine motor skills by linking shower curtain rings and letters together for this weeks Funky Finger activity. 

Weekly round up Friday 22nd September

The children were busy exploring the setting and settling into the nursery experience.

Past activities.......

Christmas 

Traditional Tales

Exploring mini beasts

Celebrating Eid

Some useful websites: just click on the link!