Hilltoppers Nursery Astrea Academy Trust
Our baby room has been designed to offer a warm and inviting atmosphere for our babies. Our baby room is designed for 0-2-year olds. We have dedicated staff team members taking care of our youngest children within a 1-3 ratio.
The room is open plan and spacious, offering lots of natural light. It has its own sleep room, which provides cots for our babies and sleep mats for baby toddlers. All have clean fresh linen provided. We take good care of our sleep equipment and follow the safety sleep guidelines.
In the baby room staff follow babies routines and needs to mirror those at home following the Key Person system.
We provide balanced meals and will support you and your child through the weaning process. If your child is breastfed, we will offer advice and support on how this can be managed at nursery. We have a feeding chair so you can pop into nursery at any time and feed your baby in comfortable surroundings.
The baby room is well equipped with furniture at the babies level. It is a light and bright environment where the babies will be introduced to new experiences and be given time to explore their surroundings safely using their senses. They also have access to our nursery garden, where babies are able to discover the outdoors in a safe manner. Babies are given opportunities to explore and have some of their first experiences doing sensory and tactile based activities.
We focus on the prime areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage building up the babies’ physical skills, supporting them in developing relationships, and building on their communication skills. Below are some example areas.
Sensory Play encourages processes within a child’s brain. It teaches them to solve problems using the senses; their eyes (sight), ears (sound), nose (smell), mouth (taste) and hands (touch). We have a range of treasure baskets full of different textures and scents, plus some sensory bottles that create different interesting sounds.
In the first three months of eye development, new born babies can only focus about 8-12 inches from their face and they see only black, white and grey. Here is a photo of our Black & White Area designed to support this development.
We often dismiss children’s early doodles and scribbles, but actually they are ‘Mark-Making‘. This is the first step a child takes towards writing. As well as enabling a child to learn how to write, mark-making can benefit a child physically and also help to develop their imagination and creative skills.
Parents
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We provide settling in visits to all children before they start their adventure with us at Hilltoppers Nursery to ensure each child becomes familiar with the environment and the nursery and in particular their assigned key person. During this time we will discuss your child’s routine, like, dislikes and you will be provided with information that will help you as a parent in this transition, too.
