Nursery Schools Cape Town

Nursery Schools Cape Town is a full-time early childhood program, providing year-round, quality care and education for infants and toddlers with programming for school-age children during the summer months.

At Nursery Schools Cape Town, we believe that quality childcare is a community service of care and appropriate education intended to support and complement the home and family.  We believe that children are active, capable learners.  We believe that the needs of individual children are an integral part of group planning.  We believe that by planning developmentally appropriate activities for each age group, the needs of each particular infant, toddler, or preschool group are best met.

Our work with children is inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to early care and education. Our teaching staff at Nursery Schools Cape Town is dedicated to professional development, as well as furthering and challenging our own thinking. Together, we traverse the pathway of deepening our understanding and the integration of the tenets of the Reggio philosophy into our work with children and families, our classrooms, and our program as a whole. Nursery Schools Cape Town strive to reflect this philosophy in four major focal areas: relationships, environment, curriculum, and documentation.

Supporting, fostering, and modelling relationships and social interactions are not only a focal point of our work with young children, they are the building blocks. As children’s relationships grow, conflicts sometimes arise, which embarks on a multi-faceted learning experience. We work with children to develop the skills to navigate conflict and work toward resolutions.

Teachers at Nursery Schools Cape Town intentionally create comfortable, inviting, and flexible classroom environments which reflect the lives and interests of the children. Open-ended and naturally sourced materials are provided, which inspire children, invite them to create and imagine, and instil wonder.

By listening to children, teaching teams construct a meaningful curriculum, allowing it to be guided by the interests of both individual children, and the group as a whole. Children’s interests and inquiries serve as the starting point from which projects develop. Teachers at Nursery Schools Cape Town see themselves as partners in the children’s learning and investigations.

The documentation of children’s learning experiences guides teachers to a deeper understanding of children’s interests and questions, provides children with the opportunity to revisit their work and to go even further, and serves as a resource for sharing the process of learning with others.

Nursery Schools Cape Town recognize the range and depth of learning that occurs through children’s play and interactions with a wide-variety of materials, space and with others. Through these experiences, supported by teachers’ engagement and dialogue, children become life-long learners and critical thinkers.