Activities | Purple Panda Nursery

ACTIVITIES

The nursery has a 100-foot garden and playground. The flooring is soft flooring to ensure children’s safety and there is a Dutch House, race track, sand pit, bark pit, water trays, small planting areas, climbing frames, balancing beams, slides, rocking horses, basketball nets, football nets, child seating areas, tables and many outdoor toys. We use the playground and garden, whenever possible, throughout the year. Children use the playground and garden in small groups on staggered rotas so they can get the most benefit out of the playground and its facilities. We believe that children benefit from fresh air and outdoor play and our outdoor areas have, therefore, been set up to be an extended outdoor classroom (children frequently undertake activities under the gazebo).

Children are also taken to the local parks, gardens and libraries, as well as to local events, as they take place. We have a number of pushchairs, to ensure the children’s comfort and safety. Parents are also asked to sign an ongoing consent for their children to attend these activities. Where children are to be taken on outings that require the use of public transport or hired vehicles, parents are asked to provide individual consents ahead of each outing. Of course, all of these outings are under the supervision of our trained and highly qualified staff.

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Having developed good communication and language skills and physical activity skills, the Toddlers and Pre-schoolers have maths and literacy activities, through play. They do lots of mark-making and junk-modelling with a variety of resources and they become aware of role-play at this age (putting dolls to sleep and cooking in the home-corner, being superheroes, play shop and dressing up in a range of costumes). They love cars, trains, dinosaurs and construction with Lego, magnetic tiles, Mobilo, wooden blocks and large plastic bricks.

We do a lot of gardening, growing flowers, fruit and vegetables. As part of our life-cycle lessons, we had caterpillars and the children watched them during the feeding and transition phases, before the caterpillars turned into butterflies. We also hatched 10 chicks and ducks in incubators and the children watched them pecking out of the eggs, and they played with them for a couple of weeks; they grew quickly!

We go to the library every week, and the children are learning French. We go on local trips and those further afield, such as The Transport Museum and Battersea Park Children’s Zoo.

The children learn a huge amount, but all through play and fun first-hand experiences.

We also offer a great selection of extra classes for your children, including football classes (given by Kickstars), dance, movement and music (given by Lucy Sparkles), French, cookery and gardening, as well as baby massage and yoga. We continue to develop new classes and would welcome parents’ suggestions in this regard. There are no extra charge for these classes.

All birthdays are celebrated at the Nursery (including the birthdays of our staff). We have cakes and party hats and parents are asked to provide snacks for the party. In addition, as a multi-cultural and inclusive nursery, we also celebrate many festivals, including Christmas, Easter, Diwali, Eid, Chinese New Year, Vaisakhi and many others. We encourage the children to learn about other cultures and traditions, celebrate global festivals and experience different foods.