LATEST STORIES
Nursery Nurturing
With our growing rolls and while building a teaching team in our relatively newly opened centre, ensuring there is a calm and nurturing environment for the infants in our Nursery has been a big focus for the teachers. We have focused on building a calm and unhurried environment that ensures the care needs of each child are met.
Recently we have had several infants start with us and settle into the environment. This has meant there has been an increase in bottle feeding, parents coming into breast feed, rocking and cuddling of infants to support their settling and sleep routine, as well as providing heuristic play resources for these infants to explore. We have also been doing a lot of soothing singing.
As the teachers have worked to support these infants through their settling process, we have noticed that the older toddlers in the room have increased their imaginary play with a huge focus on copying what the teachers are doing with then infants. They have been very resourceful getting their own sleep sacks from their lockers and wrapping the dolls up in them and then walking around the room rocking and shushing the dolls.
This play has developed over the last few weeks with beds being created for the dolls to sleep on, sleeping dolls accompanying the children in their play, and a lot of practice being carried out for swaddling the dolls. Initially we noticed one child doing it, but it’s quite usual now for us to look around the room and observe three or four toddlers supporting their babies to sleep as we are supporting an infant to sleep. Last week to enrich this learning of these children we suggested bathing the dolls. This was a very calm and soothing experience with much care being shown to washing the dolls.
We love that the toddlers have been observing the teachers and adding this imaginary play to their day. What we have enjoyed watching is the calm rocking, the soothing singing and the caring looks on their faces … all a reflection of what they are seeing from their teachers. And we believe a true reflection of the Māori values of ako whereby everyone is learning off each other, and tuakana/teina learning whereby older people support younger ones to learn and vica versa. These relationships are very important to us in the Nursery at BestStart Te Whariki and it has warmed our hearts to see them being reflected back at us by the children in our care.