Wyke Regis Pre-School Playgroup

What is it like to attend this early years setting?

Children are keen to enter the setting and respond happily to the friendly greeting from staff. Children show very high levels of good behaviour and benefit greatly from the excellent praise and encouragement staff provide. Children interact and play very well together, such as in a game of hide and seek. They shriek with laughter as their friends count and then try to find them. Staff have a clear focus for the curriculum and follow children's lead in their play. They support children's understanding of the world well. Children find a spider hiding in a tyre outdoors. They put it in a pot and examine it, telling staff, 'it has stripey legs'. They look at pictures of other insects and match and compare these. Children excitedly say, 'Look, there are one, two spiders'. Children gain a good early appreciation of stories and start to understand how print has meaning. For example, they eagerly tell their stories to staff, who scribe these for them. Children carefully draw a picture to annotate their story. Children gain confidence in their abilities and become motivated learners. They use their imaginations well. Children make a pretend tomato soup and offer a visitor a cup of this to drink. When playing in the mud kitchen outdoors, children say, 'We are making a monster mud pie'. Staff identified that children have struggled managing their emotions following the COVID-19 pandemic. They have skilfully supported children to help them to find ways of managing and controlling their emotions exceedingly well.

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

• Staff welcome and value each child extremely well and have high expectations for them all. Staff are highly successful in helping children consider the feelings of others. Children develop very positive attitudes to resolving minor conflicts and they show respect and kindness to their friends.
• The manager is proactive in supporting staff to work well as a team. She ensures staff have opportunities to develop their knowledge and skills. Staff have completed training that has helped them develop their awareness of how to use children's immediate interests more effectively to support their independent learning.
• Staff support children's early mark-making skills well. For example, children like to draw on the playground floor with colourful chalks. They make marks using paintbrushes and water. Children show great pride when staff praise them for their attempts to form recognisable letters of their names.
• Parents speak highly of staff. They say staff have managed the COVID-19 pandemic very well and they are reassured by the procedures followed. Parents comment that their children are happy and making good progress. Staff liaise with parents very well, overall. However, they have not fully considered how to ensure all parents can access information about their children's activities and contribute to their development consistently well.
• Children have good opportunities to develop their physical skills. They play outdoors regularly and enjoy climbing, running and jumping. Children concentrate well as they lift small planks of wood and rest these across different size tyres. They then walk carefully across them, holding their arms out wide to help them balance.
• The manager and staff use additional funding well to provide a wider range of experiences for children. Children show great interest in the well-organised woodwork area and are keen to have a go, such as to try hammering a nail into some balsa wood. They understand that they need to wear protective goggles to keep themselves safe when using woodwork tools, such as the electric hand drills.
• Staff support children's language skills effectively. They help children gain the confidence to start linking sounds with letters, such as the initial letter of their name. Children enjoy the poems staff tell them and start to join in with the rhyming words. Children smile as they join in saying, 'the breezy, freezy weather'. At times though, such as in free play activities, staff do not give full consideration to extending discussion with children about their games, to support their understanding and communication even further.
• Staff are reflective of their practice and continue to make improvements. They have re-organised the play areas to create a calmer environment, where children can initiate their ideas in play more easily.

What the setting must and should do next

The provider should:

• develop the opportunities for all parents to share, and contribute to all aspects of their children's learning and development
• support all staff to consistently make more use of discussion with children to extend their understanding and language skills further still.