Vision
In keeping with our ethos, we maintain a strong commitment to strengthening the social and emotional aspects of learning and development for children in our care.
Our curriculum, teaching strategies, and environment reflect research-based knowledge about the way children develop and learn.
We aim to promote the development of executive functioning skills which are vital for your child's long term learning.
Muddy Footprints is exclusively a pre-school setting where most of the teaching and learning will take place in a natural outdoor environment.
Pre-school activity is teacher-led, developmentally appropriate and individually tailored to meet each child's needs.
Practitioners consider the strengths, interests, and needs, as well as the culture and home language, of each child in the group.
They will provide a wide selection of materials that encourage exploration and investigation.
Your child will be given time and space to engage, play, investigate and talk.
All learning is play based and the adult role is to be an enthusiastic supporter of your child's learning.
They will take time to listen and record not just what your child is learning but how they are learning it.
Through modelling, careful questioning and prompts, they will enable your child to make connections to previous learning, building on skills they have learned and supporting the development of new skills.
Our planning is based on careful observation and assessment; planning takes place within a framework but one that allows for flexibility and in the moment planning enabling us to follow the interest of your child.
Why Outdoors ?
We know from research that all children benefit significantly from access to natural environments. Many of the developmental tasks that children must achieve - exploring, risk-taking, fine and gross motor development and the absorption of vast amounts of basic knowledge - can be most effectively learned through outdoor play.
The outdoors promotes development of large motor and small motor skills and cardiovascular endurance and provides the opportunities children need to explore, experiment, manipulate, reconfigure, expand, influence, change, marvel, discover, practice, dam up, push their limits, yell, sing, and create.
An outdoor environment provides for extremely rich sensory experiences. This includes the familiar senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell and also other crucial senses that are vital for optimal brain development.
It provides structures and spaces that children can change, adapt, reconfigure, impose their own meaning on, and use to expand their imagination. This encourages rich socio-dramatic play and an ideal place for children to reflect their own cultures.
Outdoor play increases knowledge and understanding of the world and provides rich opportunities for learning and development across all areas of the Early Years Foundation stage. Children who access a rich outdoor environment are healthier and happier children.
