Nursery Curriculum

At Highgate Primary School, we strongly believe that children’s Nursery experience should be relaxed, happy and fun, in a home-like environment.

Children learn best when they are happy, safe and secure and enjoy positive, warm relationships with the adults caring for them.

In Nursery the children learn through play and we are passionate about creating an exciting and magical learning environment, inside and out. We want children to run in every morning curious to discover the new sensory and small-world provocations that have been set up for them to explore. Developing communication skills is at the heart of everything we do in Nursery and we hope to create experiences that inspire children to want to share ideas and engage in conversation.

We seek to achieve a balance between adult-led and child-initiated interactions and activities so that children feel listened to and included.

We also know how important it is to work in partnership with parents to ensure that children feel well supported in nursery. We love sharing children’s achievements with parents and hearing about their accomplishments at home.

Our aim is to instil a love of learning in our youngest children that will last forever.

Our Nursery learning journey

Autumn 1: Ourselves and our school

Our Nursery year begins with a curriculum designed to help children to settle in – which they generally do extremely well! We set up our role-play area as a doctor’s surgery and the children very quickly find their way around the free flow environment, using the indoor and outdoor space. We see the children grow in confidence every day as they dance and sing, play listening games and read stories about friendships.

Autumn 2: Celebrations

During the second half of the Autumn term, the class embark on a new topic: ‘Celebrations’. The class celebrate Harvest time, learn the songs ‘Big Red Combine Harvester’ and ‘Dingle Dangle Scarecrow’ and enjoy getting messy scooping out pumpkins. The children create some beautiful artwork inspired by Bonfire Night fireworks, Diwali, Christmas and Hanukkah. The end of term finishes on a high with a wonderful show performing songs about the Nativity.

Spring 1: Transport

After Christmas, the class look at different modes of transport and begin by reading ‘Naughty Bus’. The children take great delight, each morning, finding where our own Naughty Bus has been hidden around the classroom. We think about how we travel around and turn our role-play area into a bus that takes the children on countless adventures! Next, the bus changes into a space shuttle and the children became astronauts searching for life on far away planets.

Spring 2: Buried Treasure

During the second half of the spring term, the children become pirates and sail the seven seas. They enjoy ocean-inspired stories and songs, build a pirate ship using crates and make their own treasure maps, parrots and telescopes in our art area. Next, we become palaeontologists and discover dinosaur bones in the sandpit. We travel back in time, learning lots about dinosaurs: reading great dinosaur books and creating colourful dinosaur art works.

Summer 1: Traditional Tales

At the start of the Summer term, we became engrossed in our ‘Traditional Tales’ topic. We read a different fairytale each week. The children have the opportunity to re-enact the stories using puppets and small world props. We plant our own beanstalks like Jack, make the Three Little Pigs houses out of straw, bricks and sticks and mix up our own porridge bowls like The Three Bears.

Summer 2: Animals

During the last half term, we learn all about animals. We begin with wild animals that live in different parts of the world and then, closer to home, animals that live down on the farm as well as pets and how to care for them. This is another opportunity to read brilliant stories together, sing songs and have exciting imaginary adventures. In the last few weeks, we reflect on all the wonderful things we have learnt and look back on how we have grown. We all take part in our sports day, as well as visits to Reception for playdates to ensure a smooth transition for those children moving onto the next part of their school journey.

Discover what comes next

Nursery Admissions

Click here to find out more about applying for a place in Nursery

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Reception

Find out more about the reception curriculum

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Reading

Find out how we teach children to become fluent and confident readers

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