Red Class is our nursery: one small class of three and four year olds, with its own classroom and its own garden.
Children learn here by playing, talking, building, painting, digging and asking questions. Our nursery staff are alongside them all day noticing, joining in, and adding a challenge at the right moment.
Red Class follows the Early Years Foundation Stage, the national framework for children up to the age of five. It sets out seven areas of learning and the standards for development, welfare and safeguarding that every nursery must meet.
Learning through play
Play is not what happens between lessons. It is how the learning happens.
Children build, cook, dress up, make, climb and invent worlds together. In doing, they learn to concentrate, solve problems, use language, take turns, and keep going when something does not work.
We also bring the class together each day for stories, songs, phonics, early writing and numbers.
Indoors and outdoors, all day
Red Class has its own classroom and its own garden and children move freely between them.
A child deep in making something can keep going. A child who needs to move can go outside. An idea that starts at a table can become a game in the garden.
The garden is not a break from the curriculum, it is part of the classroom.
Forest School
Every two weeks the class leaves the school site for a session with a trained Forest School teacher in a wood.
Children build, dig, climb, use real tools and learn to take small, managed risks. They go in every season and most weathers.
Music, PE and swimming
Music is taught by our Head of Music and Performing Arts in the school’s music room.
PE is taught by a specialist PE teacher. Red Class also uses the main school playground and its climbing equipment.
Swimming starts in the Spring Term, once children have settled in.
This is what being part of a 3 – 11 school means in practice: three year olds are taught by the same specialists who teach the oldest children.
Who teaches Red Class
Red Class is led by a qualified teacher. Mrs Judith Nicholas holds a PGCE alongside a Level 3 Early Years Educator diploma and the National Professional Qualification in Early Years Leadership.
She works with Miss Poppy Jensen, an Early Years Educator qualified to Level 3.
Early Years at Unicorn is headed by our Headteacher, Mrs Polly Fraley and children have the same access to our SENCo as every other year group.
What they learn
The seven areas are communication and language; physical development; personal, social and emotional development; literacy; mathematics; understanding the world; and expressive arts and design.
Most of it happens at once. Building a café in the garden means counting cups, writing a menu, negotiating roles and steadying a wobbly table, mathematics, literacy, communication and social learning together.
To the children, it is simply a café.
Moving into Reception
Every Red Class child has a guaranteed Reception place the following year.
Reception is in the same building, so the move is gentle. The rooms are familiar, the routines make sense, and many of the adults are already known.
Come and see it
Early years is much easier to understand when you watch it and you are welcome to come on any normal school morning.
Mrs Lucinda Rodgers, our Registrar, will arrange your visit.
020 8948 3926
registrar@unicornschool.org.uk
