Children in the Baby Rooms at St Pauls Nursery School have been exploring belonging, connecting with the wider world and engaging in real-world experiences this month through outdoor adventures, food shopping trips and sensory exploration.
The baby rooms have been welcoming new children and families, thinking deeply about belonging, unique learners and sense of self. The team have been using bodies and books, songs and photographs, talk and mark-making to help children connect with themselves and others. They have been playing with new parents and families together to listen and learn, celebrate and share each unique child and family. The rooms have been researching and reflecting on ideas of belonging, focusing on secure relationships, connections between home and nursery, familiar music from home, and supporting children to see themselves represented in their environment.
The children have been out in the world, noticing surfaces and materials, signs and lines, machines and technology, space and routes. They use their bodies in all sorts of ways to walk and run, stretch and reflect, point out and up and down, push and start and stop. Connecting to St Paul’s Promise “I can connect with the wider world,” children have been experiencing real first-hand learning through food shopping trips. The children have been shopping and cooking in the home corner and in the real world too, going out to the shops with their shopping lists, choosing ingredients for fruit salad, and returning to chop and munch their creations.
Sensory exploration has been rich across both rooms. Children have been making marks with mud, sand and paint, squeezing, grasping, pinching, pushing, tearing and squishing whilst developing the movement and fine motor skills essential for early writing. The children have been exploring sand with sieves and spoons, funnels and tubes, colanders and scoops, watching it run through their fingers, rain through the colander and pipe down tubes whilst making marks with brushes, fingers and toes.
These experiences show how the baby rooms at St Pauls nurture belonging, connection and curiosity through researchful practice, real-world experiences and joyful sensory exploration.