Welcome to our Pre-School
Sparklers Preschool is a small friendly preschool in the rural village of Upper Basildon, Berkshire. We are based in the village primary school which is set in an area of outstanding natural beauty. We provide children with the opportunity to grow and develop in a happy and secure environment with excellent indoor and outdoor activities. We are a Registered Charity and are run by professional and fully trained staff and supported by a Committee of volunteer parents.
Learning through play
We have highly qualified and very
experienced staff who are committed to providing an exceptionally stimulating and fun learning environment. At Sparklers ‘Learning through play’ isn’t a slogan. We carefully plan to ensure each of our children has the right play opportunities to learn and thrive and we take every opportunity to allow our children to have fun and expand their ideas. We recognise that every child approaches learning differently and we attach considerable importance to supporting every child so that they can learn in a way and at a rate appropriate for them. We can do this because we take a lot of care getting to understand our children. We ask parents to complete a questionnaire through which we hope to get an insight into their child and we assign each child a key worker whose role it is to support and understand them. |
Our Curriculum
At Sparklers we aim to support the development of happy, confident children by supporting their emotional and social development. We also aim to give them the best possible start academically and cover subjects such as numeracy, literacy, phonics, science and the environment and we strive to be creative and innovative in how we use play to enable our children to develop their knowledge and understanding of these subject areas. Our approach to learning enables our children to develop the skills they will need at school. Once at school our children display well developed emotional and social skills, they are well advanced with their phonics and numeracy and they show good creativity. They demonstrate a sense of responsibility for themselves, their friends and for their environment. We believe that by giving our children the best possible start they develop self belief and confidence in their ability. Research shows that the quality of a child’s early year’s education has a significant impact on the child’s achievements and emotional well being through to adulthood. |
Children's activities
Outdoor learning
In addition to play, we also use lots of hands on activities where the children learn through exploration and experimentation. Along with arts and crafts and computer time, we go on bug hunts and do pond dipping; we build "Beasty Hotels" and wormaries and we have recently resumed our gardening and the children have planted strawberries and potatoes. We do baking and have been making biscuits which the children decorate themselves and we are currently making a Herman friendship cake. Often we participate in joint activities with Basildon Primary School and in April we joined in with "Walk to School" week. During the preschool day, the children can choose to play with a range of toys and resources. They can also take part in lots of different activities, with an emphasis on the children choosing where they want to play, and what they'd like to play with. Older children are given some adult directed activities to develop their literacy skills.Our setting is 'free flow', which means that the children can move freely between indoors and outdoors as they wish. The activities we offer are based on the Early Years Foundation Stage, the statutory curriculum for children in this age group. We also provide some "extra-curricula" activities such as Ball Skills with Dec who helps to develops the childrens co-ordination and confidence with throwing, catching and kicking balls. Emma comes in to do a music and movement class and we have P.E. in the school hall.
Planting potatoes
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Mixing our Herman friendship cake
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Music and Movement
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Computer time
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Ofsted No: 955551 Charity Number: 1097640
