Indoor Environments
At Chapel House Day Nursery we have worked very hard to create the ideal indoor environment for our children at all stages, in all rooms. The nursery is decorated throughout in natural colours, ensuring the children’s stimulation can all be from the resources and activities rather than bright colours on the walls. We have beechwood furniture in each room further enhancing the natural feeling of the rooms.
Some of our standout features indoors include: our Community Playthings Nursery Gym in the Baby & Toddler Room, and our Dream Coracles which our younger children use. Our Nursery Gym is brilliant at encouraging the children to develop physically and when you add in the social development that comes from engaging in play on the Nursery Gym with their friends and the trial-and-error problem solving it offers, it really is an outstanding addition to the room. We find that our younger children sleep really well in our Dream Coracles, and they have the added bonus of giving us a little more play space when not in use. They also give children more independence at rest times and we use these fabulous beds as cosy spaces for story times too.
Outdoor Environments
Our outdoor environments at our nursery in West Norwood are packed with fabulous features – all under the shade of marvellous mature trees which surround our huge gardens and create a wonderful natural setting.
We have open grassy spaces where the children enjoy a whole host of activities such as the simple and age-old fun of running freely and playing together. This remains one of the greatest things the lawns provide.
We also have a large sandpit that the children love to create from – we see all sorts of ideas get dreamed up and built in there by our older children, and our younger children derive great pleasure from the texture of the sand and moving it around and into things, understanding it as a material.
Our Mud Kitchen gives the delight of dirt and some exceptional mud pies emerge from that kitchen, along with all manner of mud meals and beverages that the children delight in making.
We also have a Sensory Garden which stimulates each of the children’s senses; large climbing equipment to challenge them physically and promote physical development and confidence building; and a Growing Patch which lets them learn about life cycles, introduces them to responsibility for outcomes, and lets us teach them about caring for something else.
The children particularly enjoy the Den we have in the garden and the Climbing Cubes – with both of these they can climb and explore, take risks, invent games, and create dens for reading and relaxing. Whilst outdoor activity is a massive part of outdoor life at Chapel House, so is encouraging restful and “chilled” time in the beautiful outdoors. The large wooden TeePee is a great example of this – it’s a firm favourite for a quiet den – and reading and telling stories is a regular occurrence within its walls, along with talking together, cosying down, and looking at the clouds with friends.