At Sticky Fingers we take the development and learning of each child very seriously. We regard every child as an individual and this is reflected throughout their care and education. Nursery staff and especially key-carers take time to get to know each child individually.
An initial ‘settling in pack’ is offered to parents to complete with current stages of development and all their child’s particular needs, such as mealtimes, sleeps and physical skills already achieved. Nursery staff work with parents to ensure that children’s needs and targets are met from the first few weeks of their arrival. We continue to keep records which allow staff to monitor progress, plan to support children’s individual needs and share children’s achievements with their families.
Each child’s record is unique to them and includes observations by staff of the children’s activities, interests photographs of them at play and examples of activities that the child has experienced. This allows staff to build a comprehensive picture of every child and supports their future development and learning. Parents always have the opportunity to meet at any point with their child’s key person to discuss progress or next step targets. These records are a very important tool, which helps key-carers to provide appropriate, stimulating, relevant activities and experiences for the children that they look after.
We gather information primarily through observing children play and match this against the Early Years Framework Guidance, this is a good indicator of how children are developing, we then invite parents to share information about their child at home and discuss next steps of development.
If any issues or anxieties are identified we can all work together, sometimes with external support from professional services to set additional targets.
Every 3/4 months (or sooner if necessary) nursery staff in each room target next steps of development for each child based on the milestones as detailed in the Early Years Foundation Stage and between the ages of 2 & 3 years children have a statutory progress check to ensure they are developing. Statutory progress checks are made to ensure that the children are meeting their early years milestones
Our next step targets follows the same pattern:
- Observe (what can the children do? what do they have difficulties with? what do they enjoy doing?)
- Analyse (what stage of development are they at? what are the next steps?)
- Use (what we have found out about the children so that we plan for the next steps in their learning)