Merchant Square Day Nursery has fantastic environments for the children who attend; environments that are designed to facilitate maximum development, growth, learning, enjoyment and fun.
Indoor Environments
Our indoor environments are truly top-class. Merchant Square Day Nursery is purpose-built and we have ensured that every aspect of our space is of the highest specification. Our rooms are bright and airy, decorated with a warming neutral colour palette, which with the natural light that flows in, creates an inviting space that children enjoy spending time in. The space is very well thought out, as demonstrated by our ‘indoor-outdoors’ feature, which allows us to open huge doors from the nursery space, flooding the rooms with fresh air and a sense of the outdoors.
We have furnished and resourced our rooms at our Paddington nursery and pre-school with the best items available to Early Years. Examples of these are the Community Playthings Nursery Gym and the Dream Coracles, which we use in our Baby & Garden Rooms. As with all of our equipment we carefully selected these items for the developmental benefits they offer, whilst giving the children pleasure and fun. The Nursery Gym develops physical skills and confidence through the children tackling the different elements of it – there is a slide, steps, a tunnel, and a curved bridge. However, they also develop socially by helping each other, using the Nursery Gym to interact with each other, taking turns and sharing.
The Dream Coracles offer the children a comfortable place to sleep, and we find they sleep better in these than other beds, but the Dream Coracles also improve our children’s independence when resting, as well as enhancing their sense of security. We use the Dream Coracles as cosy spaces for gentle and quiet activities too, such as story time, to promote relaxation.
Some of our indoor features that the older children particularly benefit from are our Construction Area and Indoor Frame. The Construction Area offers children the facility to “build big”, and to unleash their creativity and imaginations. We use these to develop ideas and concepts, to grow social skills, negotiation ability and mathematical concepts. Our large Indoor Frame has lots of elements, and monkey bars, steps and slides can be added and removed, based on the needs and stage of development of the individuals using it. It’s a wonderful piece of equipment, that we use quite broadly, as it has so many benefits – it challenges and supports physical skills development, builds social skills and confidence, aids in decision-making progression, trial-and-error problem solving, and most important of all, provides endless fun as it can be played with in so many ways.
Outdoor Environments
Our outdoor environment is great, it includes dens and cosy areas perfect for story time, relaxing, and chatting with friends and Practitioners; a Mud Kitchen where the children can get their hands dirty and stuck into mud pie making; a climbing frame for fun and active play; a Growing Patch where the children can nurture vegetables, learn about caring and responsibility, and learn about life processes; and a Sensory Garden where the younger children can stimulate each of their senses. We also make sure that we use the whole local area as part of our outdoor environments – we believe there is immense value and development for the children to be found by going out exploring, encountering the “real world” and learning how to engage with it and interact with it safely. We can often be found off on walks in the park in processions of bright, fluorescent bibs.