Our Pre-School
A purpose built facility
Marshfield Pre-School is a purpose built facility, attached to the community centre. The pre-school room is large and spacious with a generous lobby area for greeting children, pegs for coats and drawers for each child. A plasma screen in the entrance lobby is a great way to show parents/carers what we’ve all been up to.
We are equipped with a small kitchen, where we can prepare snacks and meals for the children.
There is a bathroom with child-sized toilets and wash basins which makes it much easier for us to encourage the children to learn to manage their own personal hygiene. We have a small sleep room with two toddler beds where the children can rest.
Sports Hall
Pre-school is attached to the village community centre that has amazing facilities that we can use. We have access to a full size sports hall that offers children the opportunity to really extend their physical skills. We can use the hall every day for our daily music and movement sessions along with building obstacle courses and to take part in lots of sporting activities which means that even if it is wet outside the children still have a fantastic space to use all their energy and have fun with their friends.
Forest schools and allotment garden
We have a superb forest school garden onsite which is broken up into different areas for the children to explore.
This garden is designed to help the children make the most of the natural environment, exploring with water, sand, digging and planting. We have a very large sand area for the children to dig and to be creative making lots of different shapes and extending their maths skills with measuring the volume of sand in their buckets and using mini diggers.
We have raised beds which have been designed for young children to be able to stand up and sow seeds and tend to the vegetable patches where we grow raspberries, onions, potatoes, carrots, runner beans and beetroot. The beds are at a good height for wheelchair access for children to be able to work at the beds safely. Our children enjoy harvesting the amazing fresh raspberries and vegetables every season and of course watching the sun flowers grow.
The rest of the garden is frequently changed by the children with their great forest school imagination, we spend days building dens and we have a very large mud kitchen with large pots and pans and water butts where we can make all sorts of mud pies and cakes. While this is happening some of the other children will be building a very big bug hotel using all the woodland resources to hand.
Once we have decided to slow down for the day, we will all sit down in the forest school’s kitchen and perhaps cook some marshmallows on the fire and have a good chat about what we explored that day.
Physical Play Garden
In the front garden we have an all weather surface where the children can ride bikes, sit in cars and learn balancing skills and spatial awareness. We have a natural wooden activity climbing frame where the children can start to take manageable risks using the climbing and rope wall, then go along the wooden footbridge and down the slide. The children take great pride in their achievements building their self confidence.
