Our Classrooms
Crawlers Class
We created our Crawlers Class in April 2004 to cater for children aged twelve months to two years. This is a unique venture to First Steps Nursery School as we are the only local nursery to offer morning sessions only on a termly basis for children under two years of age.
We aim to provide a bright, comfortable and stimulating environment for your child where they can exercise choice, make decisions and follow their own preferences in play. Your child will be offered a variety of textures, sounds and smells through an assortment of toys and heuristic (discovery) play items, where he/she can explore their natural curiosity in a calm, safe environment with the help of familiar, attentive adults.
If your baby requires a nap during the morning, we can accommodate them either in one of our travel cots or, as preferred by most of our little ones, a reclining pushchair.
Our main objective is to provide a secure, happy place where you feel confident to leave your baby, where they can socialize with their peers, develop self-confidence and awareness of self, at the same time as offering you time to do all the things that can be quite difficult to accomplish with a little one in tow!
Explorers Class
Our Explorers are little adventurers. They are aged between two and three years and have moved on from being babies into curious, active Explorers.
From playing alongside each other they begin to form some solid friendships and progress to socializing as a group. Their play is more purposeful and their determination to succeed can be hard for some of them to understand. Through adult guidance and a helping hand they begin to develop their skills and extend their knowledge and concepts.
Through their own natural curiosity and apporpriate supervision, our little Explorers expand their awareness of the world around them. Colours, shapes and textures are recognized and explored on a daily basis. They are taught to develop mutual respect for the people around them and to cherish their environment.
The Explorers grow in confidence and autonomy in personal hygiene, learning self control and the ability to put on their own coats and shoes. Language and communication is expanded and an ability to concentrate for longer periods emerges. Language is employed with physical movements in action songs and rhymes, role-play and practical experiences such as cooking and gardening. Children are encouraged to express their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a range of expressive forms such as body movement in gym sessions, a variety of malleable materials, dance and music.
Joggers, Runners & Sprinters
Our Joggers, Runners & Sprinters stay with us from three years old until they venture off to 'Big School'. By this age our children are very 'Active Learners'. They become absorbed in their explorations and their investigations prompt them to ask questions to expand their knowledge and understanding of the world.
Their growing confidence helps them to make decisions based on thinking things through in a logicl way, finding things out for themselves, with the support of an adult if asked. As speech and listening skills develop, foundations are laid for early literacy, making sense of visual and verbal signs and in due course reading and writing.
Our Joggers are taught to enjoy stories, Books and rhymes, Recognizing that print carries meaning, Progressing to reading a range of familiar words and simple sentences. The relationship between spoken and written word is explored through mark making, drawing and children's own emergent writing forming the basis of recognizable letters.
Every opportunity is used to exploit the mathematical potential of everyday experiences, enabling children to count, match and sort numbers reliably. The children are encouraged to explore different shapes, sizes and patterns throughout their activities and how numbers are combined to form simple sums.
