About Us

Our Curriculum and More

We provide a balance of planned and free play activities for our children, supported by experienced and well qualified staff. They are encouraged to become independent, confident, involved and happy learners.

We aim to provide a curriculum to develop the whole child. Young children learn by first hand experiences i.e. doing, touching and seeing for themselves through play. We spend a lot of time outdoors in all weathers, enabling children to experience the freedom of wide-open spaces, supporting your child’s development both physically and mentally. Learning outside provides children with an opportunity to interact with the elements and helps them to gain an understanding of the world around them. One of the most important elements of outdoor play is to enable children to challenge themselves, learning to make decisions and take appropriate risks, such as such as ‘should I jump off this log?’ or ‘can I climb this tree?’

Your child's intellectual, social, emotional and creative development will becatered for through a variety of play activities. In addition, children willalso learn as part of small groups and in fun, focused groups as they preparefor school, including phonics, maths, and science.Our curriculum is a working document that continues todevelop overtime through our experiences of working closely with children,families and outside agencies. The continuous professional development of our teamallows for us to enhance our curriculum with the new knowledge we gain at everyopportunity.

We have an experienced Curriculum Lead who starts every dayas part of our room teams, ensuring that our curriculum is built in conjunctionwith the practitioners who spend every day working with our children and knowtheir endless capabilities inside out. We also have a Designated Safeguarding Lead and DeputyDesignated Safeguarding Lead who regularly spend time with the staff teamensuring their safeguarding knowledge is up to date and that the safety andwell-being of our children is at the forefront of everything we do.

Our SENCO (Special Educational Needs Coordinator) worksalongside our staff and families to devise strategies and create resourceswhich support the needs of each individual child. We can aid in seeking advicefrom outside agencies and will be with you every step of the way on your child’s journey.Parent Partnership is incredibly important to us and we know that when your child joins our nursery the whole family joins us too. There are multiple opportunities across the year to spend time as part of our setting. We hold seasonal craft and music mornings on a Saturday, meet in our local parkfive Sunday’s across the year and spend time with the residents at our local nursing home every Monday morning. Making your family part of our family is what makes us special and we are very proud of the relationships we have built inside and outside of the nursery.

Here at Abbeydale Cottage Nursery we hold the Healthy EarlyYears Award or ‘HEY’ for short. The Healthy Early Years (HEY) Award is aimed at advancing our understanding of what a healthy lifestyle is for all the family, looking at a variety of common issues such as healthy eating, how much activity should we be doing each day, good sleep hygiene, immunisation, healthy teeth, and cutting down on screen-time.We are proud and delighted that we have now held this award for three consecutive years, championing children’s health and wellbeing with everything that we do.As part of the award process, we will continue to deliver our dynamic programme of activities and share information with our families at home and across the nursery, to help us all stay physically and mentally healthy, building lifelong good habits around food, exercise, and well-being.