The area Understanding of the world involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community by being given opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places, technology and the environment.

 

Children learn about the world around them by using all of their senses. At nursery we encourage children to look carefully at things and provide opportunities to experience different textures and smells. We encourage children to be curious about things and to investigate how things work or what will happen if they do a particular thing like pouring more and more water into a container.

Watching things grow and change over time is something that we do continuously at nursery, we have introduced a number of plants and natural resources to the setting and the children help to take care of them. At home you could watch flowers in a vase open and notice the changes as they eventually die or leave a piece of bread in a sealed bag and watch as it starts to go mouldy. 

 

At nursery we encourage children to talk about themselves and their families, to share special times, events and traditions. We help them to understand that they are unique and to talk about similarities and differences in relation to family and friends. We learn about and celebrate different traditions such as birthdays, Easter, Christmas, Diwali, Chinese New Year, Halloween and bonfire night to name a few.

 

 

                        

 

 

Children are fascinated by different occupations and this is evident in their imaginative play. We provide plenty of opportunities for the children to explore these roles by creating areas such as a post office, doctor surgery, shops, vets surgery, cafe, space station and many many more.

Small world toys such as a farm, garage, zoo, trains are all important resources to help the children to learn about the world they live in.

 

            

 

Technology is an important part of the world that we live in and the children have access to toys and resources to develop skills in this area. They are supported in turning on and operating simple equipment, in exploring technological toys with knobs or pulleys and making toys work by pressing parts or lifting flaps to achieve an effect.

We help the children to understand that information can be retrieved from computers and often if they ask a question we will try to find the answer by looking on the computer or Ipad. Children are supported to complete simple programmes on the computer and to interact with age appropriate software.

Using technology also supports communication, language and literacy, hand eye coordination and fine motor skills.