Learning Experiences and Excursions at Aspire Pakenham's Nursery

Our Aspire Baby Steps Nursery Program provides children with daily activities and intentional teaching opportunities to support your child to reach developmental milestones. Each child is unique and learns at a different rate, so we allow children to explore at their own pace. Our play-based learning approach allows children to learn through sensory play while stimulating their senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. Our Nursery Hubs are specifically designed to create a warm and welcoming atmosphere for your baby to commence their learning journey and support emotional and social development in this phase of life.

Aspire’s Baby Steps curriculum incorporates a variety of different incursions to engage your child in different learning experiences. From drama, music, yoga, dance, movement, art and so much more, your child will benefit from the unique offerings at each centre.

Aspire Early Education Pakenham’s Nursery Program offers different learning experiences that are catered towards nursery age children and their development. Discover some of the activities below that the Pakenham Nursery children engage in.

Sensory Play Experiences

The children in Pakenham’s Bluebells nursery room love participating in different sensory activities. Recently they explored an animal area sensory tray with water. This activity allows children to engage their senses and explore the world around them in a fun and interactive way. It also helps build nerve connections for proper brain development and encourages the development of motor skills as well as helps with focus.

Playing with Pom Pom’s is another fun way to help develop children’s fine motor skills and is a great addition to sensory play. The nursery children develop their senses by taking off the pom pom from the lint roller and enhancing their hand and eye coordination.

Another sensory activity the nursery children enjoy is touching and holding natural resources from the environment such as different leaves and flowers. This helps them feel connected to the natural environment, while enhancing their fine motor skills through tactile play.

Sensory play experiences offer many benefits for young children such as promoting cognitive, motor, social, and emotional skills essential for future learning and well-being.

Activities Promoting Hand Eye Coordination

Many of the activities the Bluebells nursery children participate in, focus on developing their hand-eye coordination, which is important at a young age. Recently the Bluebells children participated in an activity that involved stacking blocks, where they practice gripping the blocks and then placing one block on top of each other.

Another activity involved using their little fingers to take out pom poms from a cooking whisker. They must learn how to manoeuvre the pom poms to take them out, which promotes their fine motor skills along with hand and eye coordination.

The Bluebell children also love playing with balls of different sizes, which gives them the grasping skill along with great hand and eye coordination. They become very interest in different aspects of the balls such as holding them, rolling them and more.

All these different activities promote hand-eye coordination, which is important for young children as it helps with their overall physical development and can improve their fine motor skills, helping them later in life.

Nursery Excursion to the Local Library

Aspire Pakenham have now implemented excursions for their Nursery children who would like to attend. Last Wednesday 24^th April, Pakenham's Nursery children went on their first excursion for 2024 with our educators to the local library. The Bluebells children left at 10am on an exciting adventure to Pakenham library where they joined in on the “Mums and Bubs’’ session at the library which involved story time and other fun activities for the nursery children.

These sessions at the local library will be a regular excursion as part of the Nursery curriculum, to help the Nursery children engage with their local community and explore their surroundings outside the centre. Excursions and regular outings provide many learning benefits for children, even as young as 6 months. It promotes greater social awareness and helps develop their confidence as they navigate an unfamiliar environment. Visiting different places also stimulates children's imagination and creativity. They can role-play, pretend, and make connections between what they see and their own experiences.

To learn more about our Nursery program and what we offer at Aspire Pakenham, book a tour of our centre today, or enquire now to learn more.