Our philosophy at Natural Start is that children thrive when surrounded by nature. A calm natural environment combined with close caring relationships will help your child to learn and develop as nature intended. Childhood is becoming overly standardised, overly structured and saturated with technology. At our school we will help your child's world to slow down, to calm and to connect with nature and with each other.
Young children need to engage in the outdoor environment for hours on end. For true engagement this time should be spent self-directed and unstructured. We provide children with this opportunity to simply be and have found that they become calm, proudly self-confident and oozing with creativity and contentment.
Children learn and develop through play, exploration, experimentation and discovery. Every day they engage in active, hands on experiences. They become fit, strong, agile and thus grow in confidence. They have freedom of movement and choice in their activities. Every day they choose their materials and their playmates. They interact with each other and create their own world of games. They solve problems while learning about nature, experiencing adventure and using their growing creativity and imagination.
We believe in giving children the opportunity to make mistakes and to learn from these. We don't tell children what to do but ask them what they think they should do and what the outcome may be. This is our philosophy when it comes to building friendships with their peers. We encourage children to guess how others are thinking, how they are feeling and what they can do in actions and words to influence others.
We believe in stretching children to encourage development of skills and aptitudes. This means that we never do something for a child that they can do for themselves. We have high expectations of children and find then that they always reach to meet these and so grow in character. When we give children real responsibilities they grow in independence. When we treat them with respect - and encourage them to earn respect from others, they build resilience which they will need in every future relationship.
We provide short sessions of group activities such as music, art, crafts and sports to extend knowledge, build skills, follow directions and work as a group.Outdoors is the perfect place to be at their stage of development.
