Welcome to Nursery

Welcome to Nursery, where your child’s learning journey begins in a happy, caring, and stimulating environment. We understand that starting school is a big step for both children and families, and we work closely with you to ensure a smooth and positive transition.

Our Nursery provides a play-based curriculum that encourages curiosity, independence, and confidence. Through carefully planned activities, children develop their communication, social, and early learning skills while having lots of fun. We place a strong emphasis on nurturing each child as an individual, helping them feel safe, valued, and excited to learn.

Year Group Leader

Mrs Birtles

Phonics Leader

Learning Support / Lunchtime Supervision

Miss Neal

Mrs Bradbury

Mrs Kaur

Miss Somerfield

Early Years at Park Hall

At Park Hall we provide a carefully planned and ambitious Early Years curriculum that is rich in wonder, meaningful first-hand experiences and purposeful play. Our curriculum is designed to ensure that all children, regardless of their starting points, develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to be fully prepared for the next stage of their education.

We recognise the vital importance of the Early Years in securing strong foundations for future learning. Through high-quality interactions, effective modelling and a language-rich environment, we prioritise communication and language development, early reading and early mathematics. Play is central to our approach, enabling children to explore, investigate, practise new skills and deepen their understanding in meaningful contexts.

Our Early Years team plans collaboratively to create a stimulating and well-organised environment that offers engaging opportunities for challenge, exploration and discovery. Through strong, nurturing relationships, staff develop a secure understanding of every child’s starting point. This enables us to build on children’s prior knowledge and experiences in a logical, sequential and developmentally appropriate way.

We have designed our own carefully considered curriculum goals, tailored specifically to meet the needs of our cohort. These goals ensure that learning is ambitious, inclusive and responsive, enabling all children to make strong progress and achieve well from their individual starting points.

Developing resilience, independence and positive learning behaviours is at the heart of our provision. We value children’s lived experiences and ensure that their families, backgrounds and local community are reflected within our environment and curriculum so that every child feels safe, valued and ready to thrive.

Strong partnerships between home and school are fundamental to our success. We recognise the vital role that parents and carers play in their children’s education and actively encourage parental engagement. By working together, sharing information and celebrating achievements, we create a consistent and supportive approach that enables every child to flourish.

Across Nursery and Reception, we place a strong emphasis on developing children’s fundamental movement skills, recognising that these are essential foundations for future learning. Secure gross and fine motor development underpins a wide range of key skills, including self-regulation, balance, coordination and early writing.

Through carefully planned opportunities within purposeful play and adult-directed activities, children revisit and embed key developmental movement patterns. This ensures that they develop the physical control, strength and stability required before being introduced to formal letter formation. By securing these foundational skills first, we enable children to approach writing with confidence, fluency and success.

For further information about how reading and writing are taught through our systematic phonics programme, please refer to the Policies on the drop down menus.

At school, the children regularly take part in activities such as Dough Disco and scarf dancing as part of our ongoing provision.

Dough Disco involves manipulating playdough in time to music, performing a range of actions such as rolling it into a ball, flattening it, poking with individual fingers, stretching it into a sausage and squeezing it in different ways. These fun, rhythmic movements help to develop fine motor control and strengthen the small muscles in the fingers and hands — essential foundational skills for early writing.

Alongside this, we use scarf dancing to develop larger gross motor movements. Moving rhythmically to music using scarves encourages children to stretch, sweep, twist and cross the midline, helping to build core strength, balance, coordination and spatial awareness. These larger movements are crucial in developing stability and control, which underpin children’s ability to sit comfortably, maintain posture and engage in focused learning tasks.

By securing both gross and fine motor development, we ensure children build the strong physical foundations needed to hold a pencil effectively, form letters correctly and write with increasing confidence and fluency.

We have included some photographs of the activities we practise in school so that you can try them at home too. Just pop on your favourite song and get moving and squeezing!

We hope you have lots of fun!