Here at Penmoor Nursery our qualified and experienced staff have a good understanding of children's lives and their ages and stages of development, basing our teaching around them. Supporting and encouraging children to be creative and unique individuals is a top priority for us. Developing social interaction and understanding differences in others  plays an important role in our work. We also like to know what is important to you as a parent, in bringing up your child so that we might follow the same path and make the world an easier place for them. Please don't be surprised if the staff ask you a lot of questions about your child's likes and dislikes, not only at the initial meeting but also throughout their time at Penmoor.

 Your child will have a special keyworker from the day they start at Penmoor. If they start as a two year old they will have two keyworkers so that one will always be available to them if the other is working with another child.

The keyworkers are there not only for the child  but also for the family as we do understand how difficult it can be leaving young children. Please do ask lots of questions, there are none that are too trivial or too silly. They will also be very happy to talk to you at the end of a session to tell you how your child settled, who they played with, what they chose for snacktime and anything else you would like to know.

At Penmoor we follow the Early Years Foundation Stage programme (EYFS). This means we understand there are three main areas of development which are important to your child

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development
• Communication and Language Development
• Physical development

These are the three primary areas of development. Once children are securely on the path of these three we look at four secondary areas of the EYFS

• Maths
• Literacy
• Understanding of the World
• Creative Arts and Design

Each child has their own folder with photographs and written explainations of their progress. This is kept as a record of their time with us. We strongly appreciate it when parents add contributions to their child's folder as we know that children show different areas of development in different parts of their lives and our aim is to have a recognisable,all round, individual picture.

At Penmoor we believe that the relationship between ourselves and families using our setting is of paramount importance.

This is why we encourage a culture of comunication, sharing of information between parent and keyworker and joint planning of children's Next Steps.

• Each group has  a termly coffee morning led by the keyworkers. Do come along and meet other parents with children the same age and hear what the focus for the term will be. Your child's keyworker will give you lots of information and you will have the chance to ask questions. You will also be able to look at your child's photograph folder of development and jointly set next steps.

• We like to share a Home / Nursery diary about your child. This means we can send home information about their day and you can let us know anything that is important to them. It is a priority to us that their time at Penmoor is happy and good communication about their likes and dislikes will ensure this in the best possible way. We are very happy for you to share this book with any other settings your child attends.

• At Penmoor we don't ask parents to do duties but we are always pleased to see you if you would like to come along and share a skill with the children. This might be jour job, for example if you are a dentist, doctor or farmer. It might be a skill you have such as music, pottery, cookery, carpentry, bushcraft etc. You might have a skill where we could bring a group of children to visit you such as bee keeper, farmer, vegetable grower etc. We would like to explore anything you can offer and see between us how we can make it a great learning experience for the children.

Would you like to learn more about our approach?

Please contact us on 01822 851201 or use our contact form.