Curricular Intention: To lay the foundations to become a confident communicator.

Communicating and being able to express ourselves is a fundamental skill that underpins all other learning.  At Peter Pan adults spend time talking with and listening to the children, commenting on what they are doing and introducing new vocabulary. This enables the children to develop language and the skills required for a back-and-forth conversation.

We share stories daily with the children and encourage parents to borrow books from school to share at home. 

Curricular Intentions: To be settled at nursery and become a confident learner.

To attend to their own self-care needs and understand healthy living.

Understanding our own feelings helps us to understand the feelings of others, and to self-regulate.  This area of learning focuses on helping children to become happy and friendly, leading to the formation of friendships. It also supports children to become lifelong lovers of learning.

Adults spend time supporting children to learn to work independently, together in small groups and as a whole group.  They also support children to manage the personal needs and to keep healthy.

Curricular Intention: To attend to their own self-care needs and understand healthy living.

Keeping healthy and active as a child supports the transition to a happy and active adult life.  At Peter Pan we focus on developing gross motor skills through using the trikes and scooters, playing in the developmental movement area and moving freely in the large outdoor area.  The children are taught to self-regulate their movements so that they and others around them are safe.

We support the children’s fine motor development through muscle strengthening activities such as manipulating playdough and clay.   The children can access a range of resources and activities including mark-making/writing and painting, small building blocks, puzzles, threading and sewing which help develop hand-eye co-ordination.

Curricular intentions: To lay the foundations to become a confident reader.

To write letters from their name.

At Peter Pan we encourage and support children’s love of stories through daily book-sharing and story-telling during session times and at group time.

The children have free access to books in the reading area, where they can snuggle up on the sofa and enjoy hearing or reading a story for themselves. Our core books are carefully chosen to support early reading and language development.  Children are exposed to new vocabulary and they develop confidence to join in which builds fluency and a love of reading.

Self-registering using their name card helps the children to recognise the letters of their own name and begin to realise that letters have meaning. The daily signing-in sheet encourages them to begin to write the letters of their own name and is a first step to writing other words.

Children have continuous access to mark-making materials so they can experiment and talk to adults about what their marks mean to them.

Curricular Intention:  To develop number sense.

Curricular Intention: To develop a sense of space

Mathematical opportunities are threaded throughout our environment, with many visual representations of number available to the children. This helps them to understand number to the real world.  Adults support children to develop their number sense which leads to counting skills and number recognition.  Children develop their understanding of pattern, shape, space and measure through our curriculum opportunities, such as cooking and wood work..

More focused number activities take place at group time, where the children are supported to ‘subitise’, in others words to recognise the number of objects in a small group without the need to count them.

Making maths fun helps children to become confident with number and generates a love of maths for the future.

Curricular Intentions: To take care of their environment and begin to understand changes.

To understand that they are part of a diverse community within Bedford, England.

Learning that we are all part of a wider community is fundamental to being a confident and happy contributor to society. At Peter Pan we encourage all families to share their cultural values with us through festivals and celebrations that are important to them. In the Autumn term, for example, the children take great delight in learning about and acting out both the Diwali and Christmas story for their parents.

At Peter Pan we are fortunate to have access to a large garden and encourage the children to take care of the world around them and to notice seasonal changes – through bird-watching, enjoying the plants and flowers, looking for bugs, learning about them and returning them to their natural environment to flourish and bloom for the future.

We have a small vegetable patch where we enjoy growing our own vegetables and salads to make something tasty to eat at school.

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Curricular Intention:  To develop skills and processes for self-expression, creating with a purpose in mind.

At Peter Pan we encourage the children to express themselves and their creativity in many different ways – through painting, drawing, dancing, singing and acting out favourite stories. We nurture their imaginations by providing and encouraging them to explore a range of materials, and to tell and act out their own stories. We come together as a whole school twice a week to sing together. 

Once a term we invite all our families into school to join us for a celebration where the children perform the songs they have learned.