Walton-on-Thames Nursery now open

Our educational approach

At Perfect Start, we fully understand the importance of a strong education for children in their first five years.  From the Baby Rooms through to Pre-school, we have a huge focus on ensuring that the children are educated to the best possible level.

We plan activities for the children ‘In the Moment’, which means that constantly throughout the day we are creating learning opportunities for children, based on their own individual needs and interests.  The approach that we train our staff teams on is to Observe (what the children are interested in there and then), use their Knowledge (of the child’s areas of development) and then help the child to Develop (by interacting with the child or provide additional resources to help them). 

Observe, Knowledge and Develop goes on throughout the day and ensures that each child gets an individual learning experience.  For example if a child who needs help to develop their language development was playing in the home corner ‘pretending’ to make a meal, a staff member would observe this and then set up a real cooking activity there and then for the child to take part in.  During that activity the staff member would focus on the child’s language development by encouraging the child to talk about what they are doing and introducing new vocabulary. Its simple but very effective!

We made the move to ‘In the Moment’ planning last year as traditional ‘written’ plans for children (which the majority of nurseries use) takes up staff time away from children and narrows the learning focus down to solely what has been written for the child.  In the Moment Planning allows us to cover a huge range of learning opportunities for each individual child every day and we can adapt and change plans to exactly what the child needs.

We also have a range of exciting educational programmes, including language development programmes in the baby rooms, ‘Sing and Sign’, Science programmes in Pre-school, physical development programmes in the Toddler Rooms and much, much more.

Wonderful outside play areas, specifically designed to maximise children’s learning opportunities

Our outdoor areas all have artificial grass installed so that children get the opportunity to play outside in all weathers.

We ensure that there are challenges that cover all areas of learning as well as maintain safety for the children.  We know that many children learn best outside, so we always try and maximise the amount of time children play outdoors.