The Whitehouse Day Nursery

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are happy and demonstrate that they are confident as they move around their rooms deciding what they want to play with. Children develop their physical skills. Pre-school children negotiate the steps as they climb to the top of the slide and safely turn around to come down. They balance on giant tyres and ride tricycles and scooters fast around the bicycle track. Younger children enjoy running up and down the field, and babies learn to pull themselves up to standing. They push baby walkers, which helps to strengthen their legs in preparation for walking.

Children have an eagerness to learn and spend long periods at their chosen activities. For example, children in the infant room thoroughly enjoy finding toy chicks inside the plastic eggs. Children use their small-muscle skills to twist the eggs and scream with excitement and shout 'another chick'. Pre-school children relish playing with the construction blocks. They look at books about buildings and recreate famous buildings, such as the Houses of Parliament, after looking at a book about London. Staff extend this activity and ask the children to find London on the map, which they do successfully. To further extend children's learning, staff encourage them to draw and make maps of their own.

What does the early years setting do well and what does it need to do better?

• The manager and staff implement a broad curriculum. They know the skills children need for their future learning. For example, they provide opportunities for children to strengthen their arms so that they can hold tools. This will help children to eventually hold a pencil in preparation for writing. Children learn to make marks from an early age. For example, babies use chunky chalks to make dots, and the children in the infant room wave pieces of material in big circular movements.
• Staff promote children's language skills. They talk to babies so that they can hear words and they use good questioning skills for pre-school children to engage them in conversations. Staff support children with special educational needs and/or disabilities to develop their communication skills. For example, they introduce visual cards to help them to communicate their needs.
• Partnership with parents is strong. Staff involve the parents in their children's learning. They send home photos and comments about what their children are doing so that parents can continue their child's learning at home. Parents comment that the staff are friendly and understand their children's needs.
• Staff involve the parents in finding out about what their children's experiences are at home. They use their findings to implement activities to widen children's knowledge. For example, they have recently put in place a night camera so that children can see what animals are awake at night. In addition, they provide opportunities for children to learn about how plants grow. These activities help children to learn about nature.
• Staff promote children's independence skills. They encourage children to 'have a go' as they complete tasks for themselves. For example, toddlers complete jigsaws, and children in the infant room use jugs to learn to fill and empty the buckets with water. Pre-school children demonstrate their independence skills as they put on their own coats to go outside to play, take themselves to the bathroom and blow their own noses.
• Overall, children's behaviour is good. For example, they take turns as they share the tweezers to pick up the pom-poms and the equipment in their sand play. However, on occasion, some indoor physical activities are not well organised and a small group of children lose interest and disengage. They run around the room and play guitars loudly. The noise level at this point is loud and disturbs other children who are playing close by.
• The manager supports her staff through regular supervision meetings to discuss their performance. Staff take part in regular training to help with their professional development. For example, they take part in a course to enhance children's communication. From this, they make changes to the rooms to create cosy areas for children to be able to sit and talk to each other.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• strengthen staff's understanding of how to manage the noise levels in the pre-school room so that this does not impact on children's learning
• review how group activities are organised to ensure that all children are fully engaged, to extend learning opportunities further.