Active Childhood

Inspiring young children to lead an active lifestyle begins in their childhood. Most young children are naturally generally very active and enjoy exploring the world around them. This allows them to develop their gross motor skills and gradually develop their fine motor skills.

Generally, as children progress through education their level of active participation in sport, or other physical activities, tends to significantly decrease. This might be due to spending more time focusing on other areas of academia, or the lack of access to or sometimes they tend to prefer to spend more time attached to a screen. We feel it is important to instil the significance of an active lifestyle in our children as part of their physiological growth, but also as a foundation for general health and well-being in the future.

We absolutely encourage children at our nursery to be highly active. Whether this be moving around in our outdoor play area, popping bubbles and playing football on our smart floor or walking to the local park for group activities and outdoor games. Our team are passionate about facilitating a range of activities to accommodate even the wiggliest of children, encouraging the healthy building blocks of an active lifestyle, which we hope will stay with them into adulthood.

Creative Minds

We are passionate about inspiring creativity through learning. With a plethora of activities designed to spark creative minds, our specialist equipment accommodates everything from Music, Dance, Art & Crafts, Drama and more!

Music has an incredible ability to move us, provoking emotions and changing the way we think and feel. It also improves brain function, closely linked with many areas of a child’s early development. Not only does music enhance a child’s aural abilities and language skills, but research also suggests a strong correlation between active participation in music and general learning ability and academic attainment. Music is a great way to engage children in learning, encouraging creativity and artistic expression, and to help them connect with their imagination and channel emotions.

Our specialist knowledge and equipment allow us to offer a range of creative and music-based activities for your child. With early introductions to a whole collection of world instruments, singing activities and piano playing; we encourage your child to be confident and self-assured, naturally applying creativity across all areas of learning.

Participation in music not only enhances a young child’s development, but also ties in with an extensive range of skills and competencies relevant to future academic progress.

Listening

Listening is the first mode of language that children acquire, and it is important for their understanding of the world and ability to communicate effectively with others. The ability of our brain to differentiate tone and pitch in a sound is what makes us able to understand language. Exposure to music from an early age gives the auditory system a head start, allowing speech and language skills to develop much more effectively.

Speech & Language

The human brain processes music and language in a similar way, involving auditory processing of individual sounds. It is in understanding variations in pitch and verbal attenuation that we are able to decipher different words, using our memory to identify their meaning. Exploring music also improves phonological and phonemic awareness in speech. Just as music comprises of many different sounding notes, speech is also built up of connected phonemes, which when put together make up the words and sentences of spoken language.

Concentration

Music develops concentration skills, encouraging discipline and the ability to maintain attention to a refined task over prolonged periods of time. This is highly important for further development of any skill or task.

Coordination

Playing music improves hand-eye coordination and dexterity and enhances motor skills. These are all very useful when partaking in physical activities of any kind.

Confidence:

Participation in music and particularly performance can play a significant role in boosting self-confidence and social esteem, encouraging imaginative expression of creativity whilst reinforcing the importance of inclusion and cooperation. Children can also build a sense of pride following achievement, gaining enthusiasm for learning.

Relaxation & Patience:

Music can be used to relax the brain. It also teaches the importance of patience and perseverance to a particular task or learning objective, a skill which is increasingly important in later education.

Family Values

We live in a diverse community and all our staff and children reflect that. Being able to interact in a positive environment with people of so many different cultures, backgrounds, beliefs and languages is one of the most amazing things about our nursery, so we want the children to feel that this is amazing and fun as well. It all focuses on one word: Respect.

Our values are simple and orientated around helping all children from any background to join in our own little wonderful community here at Monkey Puzzle.

Respect

Mutual respect and tolerance are central to our values, it’s something we never stop learning about throughout our lives and it’s important to us that your child starts this learning journey on the right foot. Respect can mean and apply to many things, but here we think of it as a mentality which helps us get along and grow together. The mentality we seek to encourage is one of acceptance, consideration and kindness. We believe that 3 key learning areas for children are respecting individuality, respecting communities and respecting rules and that all of these areas are interlinked, with respect being central.

Individuality

Everyone is a unique and free individual, with our own thoughts and feelings and we all deserve to be treated as such. That means understanding how people are different and how to respect and appreciate those differences. We want children to develop their own confidence in themselves, not just by teaching them, but also by celebrating what makes them unique. We want our children to feel proud of their progress so we always praise improvements and make sure they can see how we feel. Our walls are filled with the children’s work and they help us make a lot of our displays too, with each child making their own special mark in our nursery.

Rules

As adults, we have to be able to understand and respect a variety of boundaries, ranging from people’s personal comforts to the laws of our land, as well as the importance of the rule of law. Children can’t understand such complexities, but it’s an important part of their emotional and social development to get used to boundaries and responsibilities. Children are encouraged to be considerate of others, to cooperate patiently with the adults and to all help keep our rooms somewhat tidy, though of course we do most of the clearing up ourselves! This helps to make the nursery a fun and fair educational setting for all children, whilst helping them to develop an understanding of boundaries and a sense of right and wrong based on respect for others and their environment.

Community

Britain is a democratic, multicultural community of individuals and we want to make sure that children are well prepared to flourish in such a community. Our focus is to create a community which helps every child grow to fulfil their potential through learning and fun. Key to being a happy member of a good community, is being able to give consideration and to help others understand and be considerate of you. We encourage this with group activities combined with a freedom and comfort in expressing thoughts and feelings. Children are asked about how they and others feel, as well as given chances to participate in voting on the direction of some activities, so that they can develop an understanding of other’s preferences and how we all matter equally.