Nursery - Miss Nash, Mrs Richardson and Miss Luke 2024 - 2025

Welcome to Nursery

We are a maintained nursery who provide education for children aged 3 to 4 years of age. We offer 15 hours funding places for all children and 30 hours funding places for parents and carers who are eligible. Additionally parents and carers can purchase extended sessions.

We currently have places available at our Nursery for 3 and 4 year olds. Please contact the school office by email [email protected] for further information if you would like your child to join our Nursery.

If you would like your child to attend our nursery for 30 hours per week, please contact the school office to inform them of your interest and provide your 30 hour eligibility code.

From this academic year, we are offering extended nursery sessions from 11:30am until 3:00pm. If you are interested in your child attending these sessions, please contact the school office.

We would like to welcome you and your child to Wistaston Academy Nursery and we look forward to working with you over the forthcoming year.

Key Person

Miss Nash, Mrs Richardson and Miss Luke are the Nursery class teachers. The Nursery team also includes Miss Sutton and Mrs Taylor.

Your child’s new key person will introduce themselves to you during the initial settling in sessions. This staff member will help your child and yourselves with the transition back into Nursery. It is important that your child feels confident and secure within the Nursery environment and building a relationship with a familiar key person will help with the settling in process. Working in partnership with families, the child’s key person will ensure that their individual needs are being met. It is also the key person’s role to support the nursery teacher to provide progress and developmental reports on your child.

Nursery Opening Times

This year all children are attending morning or afternoon sessions from Monday to Friday.

Session times are as follows:

Morning Session 08:30am - 11:30am

Extended Session 11:30am – 3.00pm

It is important that children arrive on time for their session as it helps them to settle quickly and develops right attitudes to school.

Going Home

Please ensure that you collect your child on time. Children can become stressed if parents or carers arrive late to collect them. Staff will only let the children go with the adults named on our consent sheet. If someone unknown to the staff is collecting your child please give the school prior warning. If you are unavoidably delayed and someone else needs to collect your child, please ensure you have telephoned the school office on 01270 910500.

Working with Parents & Carers

You will have been shown how to access your child’s online electronic journal on Tapestry as part of your child’s ‘Including Me Plan’ meeting. You will receive an email notification from Tapestry which will enable you to set up your own password to access your child’s journal. We encourage all parents/carers to add comments to the Nursery Team’s observations and to add your own observations of your child’s learning and experiences at home. Your contributions to your child’s learning journal are valued and help to inform the Nursery Team. Every half term we will email and post on the Wistaston Academy Nursery class webpage a Home Learning Opportunities guidance sheet to offer ideas and activities of how you can support your child’s learning at home.

We plan to deliver Stay and Play activities during the year when it is safe to do so. These sessions will enable you to see what your child does during their time at Nursery. During these sessions there will be a particular focus, such as developing language skills, reading for pleasure and messy play activities. This will enable you to gain a better understanding of how these activities help your child’s learning and development; and also provide you with ideas about learning activities that you can do with your child at home.

Snacks

Children are offered a healthy snack during each session. All children have a carton of milk or a glass of water and we encourage them to drink this. Children are also encouraged to choose from a selection of fruit or vegetables. There is usually a choice of two items e.g. carrots or apples. Children always sit down to have their snack and this becomes a social time where they can chat with their friends and the adult responsible for snack that day.

Water is also freely available throughout the day.

Lunches

Children who stay for lunch bring their own packed lunch and sit with a midday assistant whilst they eat it. Please ensure your child has a sensible amount of healthy food in their box e.g. a few small sandwiches, a piece of fruit, a yoghurt, a healthy snack bar and a drink. Chocolates, sweets and fizzy drinks are not allowed.

The Nursery Library

The Nursery Library will be open every Tuesday and Thursday at 8:25am. This will be an opportunity for you to choose a book for your child. Each child will be given a book bag to use to transport their library book to and from the nursery.

School Uniform

At Nursery all our children wear the Wistaston Academy school uniform. The children enjoy wearing it and it helps them to feel part of the Wistaston Academy community. However, you can bring a bag of old clothes to be used as spare if your child needs changing during the session.

Please make sure all your child’s clothes are named clearly as this helps staff to ensure all children go home wearing the right clothes!

Outdoor clothes

All children go outside every day so please send your child to Nursery with suitable outdoor clothes. Warm, waterproof coats with hats and gloves are needed for winter and sun hats and sun lotion for sunny days. All children need a pair of wellingtons to be kept in Nursery.

What is my child learning in nursery?

You can find out what your child is learning in Nursery by viewing your child's online Tapestry journal and the display board in the cloakroom. This is updated weekly and includes future events too.

Useful websites to help you at home:

Chat, play, read!

Young children love it when you chat, play and read with them, even if you think they're too young to understand. You can turn almost anything into a game. Every little thing you do together will help them with nursery. For tips to help with speech development and learning activities you can do with your child click here.

Your words build their world...

Give your child the best start in life by helping them learn to talk. Tiny Happy People can help you develop your child's language skills. Explore their simple activities and play ideas for 3-4 year olds here.

For more ideas have a look here.

All children like songs and rhymes. They like to hear your voice, the repetitive language and the actions. It all helps them to learn about language. Click the image for lots of popular songs and nursery rhymes.

For more songs and rhymes have a look here.