Welcome to St Mary's Day Nursery
Welcome to St Mary's Day Nursery, we are an Ofsted registered nursery based in Far Cotton, Northampton. Our nursery has been established since 1981 and been offering quality childcare for many years for 2- 5 year olds, both serving the local community and beyond. We are a registered charity which is run by a board of managers.
We know how important your child is and aim to deliver the highest quality of care and education to help them achieve their best, through our child centred approach to fun and active learning. We aim to work with our parents to best meet each child's individuals needs, through unique and exciting play opportunities to allow their learning and development flourish.
Our aims are
- to provide high quality care and education for children below statutory school age
- to work in partnership with parents to help children to learn and develop
enhance the local community's quality of life and well being and provide parents and children with a service that celebrates diversity and equality.
Butterfly Room
This is our preschool room, for children aged 3-5 years. For most of the children this room will be the final stage of their St Mary’s journey before the children transition to school and is where they move to once they have progressed from the caterpillar room.
In this room we promote learning through play, creating independent critical thinkers and supporting freedom of choice for our children with various learning opportunities through a range of areas in the setting. For example:
Role play area, supporting imaginative and social play
ICT area
Creative area, where we do
Book corner and quiet area including our listening station where we can interact with puppets, story sacks, story tapes and look at all our lovely books.
Small world area
Tabletop toys
Construction activities
Messy and sensory trays
These areas in the classroom with our range of resources and toys, support the early years foundation stage, enabling our children to meet developmental milestones and learn valuable skills across a wide range of areas, promoting problem solving, communication skills, physical development, creative development and personal, social and emotional development.
All activities are planned around children’s needs and interests and everything is designed so that the children can access themselves and see the activities on offer. Our area of interest and topic changes regularly according to the children or based on their current interests. The children are invited to bring things in from home relating to our topic and can be added to our interest table on display in the room.
In this room, we also support independence by having responsible roles such as pet monitor where the children take turns to look after the classroom pet. We have a self service snack and lunchtime routine helping the children gain life skills and become more independent as there prepation to go to school. A special helper is also chosen each session to help with this. As part of the preschool preparation we do a lot of work with the children based around name recognition and writing and practising skills such as getting our own coats and belongings independently, all in a fun and engaging way for the children.
In the butterfly room we also have an achievements ‘Superstar’ board which encourages the children to reach unique goals set for them as an incentive to be responsible for their own learning, which is supported by parental involvement as we celebrate achievements both in setting and at home.