Buttercups

Buttercups is a community based pre-school located in the grounds of the Balsham Meadow Community Primary school. It provides care and education for children from two years up to school age.

Buttercups provides a safe, secure and stimulating environment aimed at building a child’s confidence and developing social skills, language, and creativity and preparing them for school.

Buttercups is staffed by a dedicated team of practitioners all trained specifically in childcare, learning and development. We are located in a large, modern and spacious mobile building in the grounds of the Meadow School. The building has its own covered outdoor decking area that is suitable for outdoor play throughout the year and we have a secure bark/mud kitchen play area leading off from the deck area. The children have supervised access to the school’s secure outdoor areas including a playing field, a playground, play equipment and a nature area.

Buttercups have developed a number of strategies to promote positive behaviour, to recognise the interests and achievements of our children. Examples of these strategies are:

• CAPTAIN OF THE DAY – where the children are selected to be in charge for a specific day. They help the adults and other children with specific enjoyable tasks and activities and are allowed to bring in a favourite toy for show and tell.
• WOW CERTIFICATES – these are given to the children by the staff when they have achieved something for the first time such as putting on their own shoes, climbing up the slide or joining in with an activity they would usually shy away from. The children take these certificates home to share with their families.
• INTEREST TREES – our interest tree is designed so that the children and parents can talk together about what they like and dislike. They can draw pictures of these onto a leaf and stick it on the tree. This enables us to incorporate all of the children’s interests into our planning.

Each week of each term is planned in advance so that parents are aware of what the focus of play and learning is each week. It makes every session fun and different for the children and helps children to prepare for school using a specially tailored curriculum that follows the Early Years Foundation Stage – which is focused on the importance of learning through play and fun.