At Toddletown Day Nursery in Farncombe, we hold two inset days a year. Read on for more information about our Spring 2023 Inset!
Inset days are a beneficial event for both staff and the children within an early years setting. They provide an opportunity to reflect on practices, engage as a team, discuss our environments and have fun; all while gaining knowledge and skills.
A good and effective inset day should be fun, personalised, energetic and balanced between sitting and being active. We certainly achieved that at Toddletown and had an excellent day with so much learning, engagement from the team and lots of laughter.
At Toddletown Nursery we hold two inset days a year; one is for the individual nurseries and the second is a companywide inset day, where all our nurseries come together to share and learn from each other.
On 27th April 2023, our Farncombe Nursery team focused on six big areas of early years development. A brief summary of a couple of these areas are included below to give you an idea of how beneficial our inset days are. More details will be added to our blog in the coming months.
For the child development section of the day the team were looking into the development of children in our care as a whole, how children develop, ages and stages and how we can scaffold their learning.
This subject is really beneficial for both staff and children. For our staff team it allowed them to discuss any areas they needed support with for their key children, any areas in which they are currently working on or children have shown interest in and what path they could go down with them to enable the children to learn appropriately for their age and stage of development.
There was much discussion around younger children knowing numbers and although children may be able to recite numbers 1-10, which is an amazing achievement...
Do they know the true meaning behind numbers 1-10?
Could they count 1-10 items out of a larger group of numbers?
This got the team thinking about numbers and what activities they could do to scaffold the children’s abilities to count from 1-10.
Schemas of play was another big area of discussion and one that sometimes takes some time to fully embed and embrace in nursery life. A schema is a way in which a child learns through repeated behaviours of play. There are 9 schemas:
Transporting is probably one of the ones that stands out more often in nurseries; as it involves children moving toys from area to area e.g. transporting play dough into the role play area to use as pretend food play. For some, this can seem like they are making mess, not using resources where they have been put, but for others it means allowing children to use the resources where they see fit and where their imaginations have taken their learning.
To end the day the staff team took part in a charity shop competition where they were tasked with taking their £5 and heading to a charity shop to see what goodies they could find and bring back to nursery. The team jumped in their cars, drove into Godalming (they only had 45 minutes!), and sourced some great buys. They then had to come back and discuss what they could use their resource for in the nursery, the winning group had many ideas for their resource and we can’t wait to see some of them in action.
We can't wait for our company wide Inset ay in the Autumn!
If you have any questions on our inset day, or other ways in which we are continuously learning and development please get in touch.
To enquire about spaces at our Nursery in Farncombe or Farnham, or to find out more about our nursery jobs, email office@toddletowndaynursery.co.uk
Posted on 23rd May 2023
Company number 11782569/ 13775454. Registered office: 14 Kingsway, London, England, SW14 7HS
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