Is your child 2 or 3 years old? Are you considering bringing your child to the Nursery this autumn? Learn more about what the important aspects to be taken into consideration are when starting Nursery. Our Nursery Educational Coordinator, Tania Răduță, explains in an open letter to parents how the environment built by our team helps every child to learn and develop.
“Dear Parents,
Creating an Enabling Environment in which each child feels safe, plays, explores, and learns is a key aspect in the Early Years Curriculum. This, together with a carefully prepared induction period for each child, according to own interests and needs, smoothens the first days of nursery for children and also for parents who are sometimes more excited than their toddlers.
Our curriculum which provides activities taught in English, are engaging, meaningful, fun, and is built around four major principles. They can be ‘felt’ immediately one enters our setting.
An Enabling Environment supports a child’s development in all of the seven areas of learning. It is child-centred and has three major parts: the emotional environment meaning the atmosphere of the setting, the indoor environment with its available resources which promotes activities initiated by children and teachers, and the outdoor environment which stimulates movement, creativity and exploration.
Providing an enabling environment for each unique child might be challenging but at the same time rewarding for teachers and for children as they benefit from differentiated activities designed or initiated in accordance to their own interests. It needs rigorous background planning and a lot of attention to detail.
We make sure that each child feels welcomed into the setting and we give them time to form an emotional bond with their teachers.
We welcome and value the uniqueness of each child in the Nursery. We understand and we respect what each child brings into the setting in terms of own culture, language, type of family, or beliefs. We also see that each child learns in different ways every day. We see different schemas in their play and what we do is provide opportunities for them to engage in active learning through hands on experiences. We also transform mistakes into opportunities for learning, we encourage them to recognise their own unique qualities, and we support them to make friends, to form and to maintain Positive Relationships.
Only through positive relationships do children learn to be strong and independent. We make sure that each child feels welcomed into the setting and we give them time to form an emotional bond with their teachers. At the same time, the teachers build positive relationships with parents through feedback and effective communication. We listen to parents and children, we take into consideration their feedback and this is what helps all of us become motivated to constantly improve and become better learners.
Learning and Development is what we know that each child is entitled to. This will only result from the interaction of the other three principles described above. In Avenor Nursery, the teaching and non-teaching teams learn from each other and work hard and with great passion to ensure children’s wellbeing and progress. We have the prime areas of learning in mind when planning for toddlers (Personal Social & Emotional Development, Communication & Language, and Physical Development) in order to lay the foundation for the specific areas of learning (Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World, and Expressive Arts and Design) for pre-schoolers.
It is not hard to follow or adapt a curriculum; what is the most important thing is to be committed to creating a culture of learning in which the principles are embedded. Then, children, parents and teachers can celebrate the success and continue the learning journey.”
Kind regards,
Tania RĂDUȚĂ, Avenor Nursery Educational Coordinator
