The School Day/Daily Routine

The Nursery setting

Reflecting the OPS programme, the Nursery is an open-planned setting, which presents the students with the opportunities to make choices throughout each session. Our daily programme is designed to reflect students’ needs, interests and stage of development. Using individual learning objectives, they interact, explore, investigate and further develop their communication skills through a variety of learning centre’s. These centre’s reflect the six Key Learning Areas (KLAs) described in the OPS curriculum.

Key Learning Areas (KLA's)

Each of these Key Learning Areas is equally important and cannot be delivered in isolation of each other. Therefore, each experience presented to the students fosters more than one Key Learning Area, thus supporting a rounded approach to their development. Free play underpins all development and learning for young children. Most children play spontaneously and it is through play that they develop intellectually, creatively, physically, socially and emotionally. Through our open-planned room children are able to choose from a variety of activity stations.

Making choices

Enabling students to choose between book corner, messy play or construction play allows them to make choices reflecting their natural interests and impulses whilst learning to make smooth transitions between experiences. The Key Learning Areas are integrated into our daily programme through a variety of child-initiated and teacher-led experiences. All experiences, whether indoors or outdoors, show our understanding that all children learn and develop in different ways and at different rates. This allows them to interact in a positive and meaningful way, at their own level and pace.

Progress

The progress of each child will be monitored through observations by professional psychologist, work samples, photographs, portfolios and Parent-Teacher conferences. This information will be integrated into the Child’s Profile, creating a collective assessment tool, which will help set the student’s personal goals. These profiles also provide a summary of each student’s progress towards the Early Learning Goals that are recommended by the OPS council. Together, these strategies enable us to achieve our objective of providing a suitable level of challenge for happy, well-motivated students.