Welcome to Honeybourne School Nursery ~
Where you will see:
Kate Drew,
Nursery Manager, SENCO & Designated Safeguarding Lead.
Contact the Nursery directly:
Landline: 01386 800285, Mobile: 07596 862732 or email: kdrew@honeybourneprimary.org
Nursery Assistants: Charlotte, Emma, Jess and Vicki.
All Nursery Assistants are Paediatric First Aiders.
Our Nursery:
In the nursery, our children are two, three and four years old.
We have our own designated nursery and garden area where we have a range of activities such as sand and water, construction, role play and craft.
The children practise their physical skills and learn about the world around them. We enjoy listening to and acting out lots of stories and rhymes, singing and dancing, exploring and investigating and getting messy whilst playing and learning inside and out!
Children can join the nursery any time after their 2nd birthday.
Some 2 year old children and all 3 and 4 year old children (the term after their 3rd birthday), are entitled to 15 hours of funded early education and childcare per week, for 38 weeks of the year.
Children aged 9 months to 4 years of working parents may also be entitled to funded childcare for up to a maximum of 30 hours per week.
To find out more or to arrange a visit, please contact the Nursery Manger, Kate Drew on 01386 800285 or 07596 862732 or email: kdrew@honeybourneprimary.org
Breakfast & Afterschool Club – Little Pears:
Please contact littlepears@honeybourneprimary,org for more information.
Speech & Language:
We work closely with the NHS Speech & Language team; Emma Checketts is our Speech & Language Therapist.
Emma visits our nursery throughout the term, supporting our children and their families as necessary.
Partnership with Parents:
At Nursery, we use the Seesaw app to keep families connected with their child’s learning and experiences.
Through Seesaw, we can share photos, observations, achievements, and special moments from your child’s day, giving you a wonderful insight into their nursery journey.
The app also allows us to communicate important information, celebrate progress, and share ideas for supporting learning at home.
We value working in partnership with parents, and Seesaw helps us maintain regular, secure, and meaningful communication between home and nursery.
Transition from Nursery to Reception:
At Honeybourne Nursery, we use a themed approach to learning, reflecting children’s interests, where each term an exciting topic is used as a starting point for learning.
Autumn Term 1 2026
Our focus topic for the first half of the Autumn term is:
Through our planned activities, children will be learning their full name and how old they are. They will begin to understand their significant milestones including when they learnt to walk, talk and about starting nursery. Children will begin to know what they like to eat, play and read, and what they dislike. They will learn that people like and dislike different things.
Children will know the people that live in their house and whether their brothers or sisters are older or younger than them. They will know the roles of people within their house and how they help them, including reading a bedtime story, washing, cleaning and cooking.
Children will begin to understand what their parents do for a job (if they work) and will recognise the key adults that work in our nursery and know who to ask for help.
They will learn the different areas of our nursery including the toilets, garden and areas within the classroom.
These are some of the stories we will be enjoying:
Henry our ‘Everywhere Bear’:
Henry is our Nursery ‘Everywhere Bear’. He loves to go home with the children for short visits to experience new adventures.
He likes to join in with family life and we send home his diary so families can record his visit.
We read Henry’s adventure stories to the class and encourage the child to talk about their time together using prompts from the photos included.
Zones of Regulation:
We have a social-emotional learning curriculum to teach children self regulation and emotional control.
In Nursery, we use the Zones of Regulation and the ‘Inside Out’ characters to help children identify different feelings.
We talk about the colours associated with the different emotions and children learn to recognise different facial expressions and talk about times when they have experienced these feelings.
The children regularly learn to identify and name emotions. They have given examples of when they might feel this way, using their own words.
Monster Phonics
Monster Phonics is child-centred and creates a love of learning. Our monster characters bring phonics to life, adding engagement so that learning is both fun and purposeful for children.
Our Monster Phonics Foundations Programme develops speaking and listening skills. Children learn to become attuned to the sounds and begin to develop oral blending and segmenting skills. This teaching lays the foundations for teaching children to recognise letters (graphemes) and their associated sounds (phonemes). It also involves breaking a word down into the smallest units of sound e.g. c-a-t, c-oa-t.
The government Phase 1 curriculum consists of seven aspects:
- Aspect 1 – General sound discrimination – environmental sounds.
The aim of this aspect is to raise children’s awareness of the sounds around them and to develop their listening skills. - Aspect 2 – General sound discrimination – instrumental sounds.
This aspect aims to develop children’s awareness of sounds made by various instruments and noise makers. - Aspect 3 – General sound discrimination – body percussion.
The aim of this aspect is to develop children’s awareness of sounds and rhythms. - Aspect 4 – Rhythm and rhyme.
This aspect aims to develop children’s appreciation and experiences of rhythm and rhyme in speech. - Aspect 5 – Alliteration.
The focus is on the initial sounds of words. - Aspect 6 – Voice sounds.
The aim is to distinguish between different vocal sounds and to begin oral blending and segmenting. - Aspect 7 – Oral blending and segmenting.
The main aim is to develop oral blending and segmenting skills.
Each aspect contains three strands:
- Tuning into sounds (auditory discrimination)
- Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing)
- Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension
Useful Videos
Watch the video below to practice the letter sound and names – sing along and learn!