At SMART Nurseries, we follow a range of guidance to deliver the best provision for your child.

We follow:

• the Healthy Under 5s Programme, promoting healthy environments and encouraging healthy lifestyles from an early age;
• the Birth to 5 Matters guidance which seeks to provide foundations of highest quality provision for children and
• the Healthy Movers programme, developed by children’s charity the Youth Sport Trust and run by the charity and Active Cornwall to develop physical literacy in early years children to improve their school readiness and social mobility.

We are passionate about reading.  Not only do stories support children with the recognition of written words but reading stimulates their imagination and extends their understanding of the world around them. 

Within our provisions we want to provide not just reading but an opportunity to support children to develop their creativity and imagination.  We want to develop children's engagement through sounds, performance and a story that fully excites them to feel like they can be writers. 

We have therefore introduced Story Scribing, an approach used by Vivian Gussin Paley as a wonderful way to introduce a world of endless possibilities.

Story Scribing allows the children to have access to a focused story which is read throughout an allocated time frame, supported with a story map, props (such as puppets and wooden spoons) and instruments which are used to create sound effects throughout the story.

Children embed their own ideas and further develop their speech and language acquisition. They are given the opportunities to record their own stories through dictation or own written words which are supported by their key person.  Each story is kept within a book that can be revisited to read through, expand and further support recognition of letters and sounds. Scribing allows opportunities for children to change a story structure; how they feel the story may end; or even add characters that they feel should be in the story they are reading. 

Sentence starters, such as:

Run Run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm the......

provide endless opportunities for our little writers to introduce their own ideas.