Here at Old Town Day Nursery in Beaconsfield, our environments are extremely important to us. We believe that all elements of our childcare need to be of the highest possible quality – our staff team, our philosophy and approach, our food, and of course our environments – both indoors and outdoors.
Being a purpose-built nursery, our spaces are all optimally designed for high quality childcare. We have decorated our rooms in a soft and calming neutral colour-scheme and we ensure our natural feel is complemented by the wooden flooring and furniture that we have fitted throughout the nursery. Our full-height windows lining the walls mean that the rooms are very bright and light, which is of huge benefit to the children, creating a feeling of space and natural light.
Our resources and equipment are all chosen carefully to offer something important and special to the children. We are always looking for items that promote learning and development through play and enjoyment.
An example of this is the Community Playthings Nursery Gym in our Baby and Toddler Room. This brings our younger children so much fun and delight as they tackle the different elements of it – slide, steps, bridge, tunnels – independently, with Practitioners’ support and with each other. They create lots of imaginative play using this outstanding piece of equipment, all while developing their physical skills and capabilities, developing socially through sharing, taking turns, helping each other, and playing together. They also build their confidence in their bodies and decisions as they successfully tackle the Play Gym, finding it easier as they do it. They develop trial-and-error problem solving too as they try different methods of negotiating the obstacles. The benefits and development are so varied and extensive, and all from something that they take great pleasure from. This is the centre of the Old Town Day Nursery ethos and the starting point for everything we include in our environments.
Our outdoor environment is fantastic. We have made sure it gives our children a connection to nature through the open grassy spaces and mature trees lining the garden. We’ve built from that excellent base by adding facilities and features that offer the children enrichment, development and variety of opportunities. We’ve done that with our sand pit, Mud Kitchen, Sensory Garden, hard standing area with ride-ons and the large wooden tee-pee that the children use as a wonderful den.
A firm favourite amongst our older children is the climbing frame we have in our garden. It offers so many opportunities for our children to explore and develop, and not only in the obvious physical ways. It’s an open-ended resource that gives them the opportunity to make dens under the platform, to grow plants in the attached window boxes, do art and painting on the Perspex sheet and have no end of fun using the pulley system. We love the breadth of games the children have invented using the climbing frame, we know how amazing their imaginations can be, but getting to witness it first hand is always a delight for our Practitioners. We’ve seen a Pirate Ship and a Space Station in our garden, just to give two recent examples.