Infants

The quality of experience a child has on first entering full-time education will set the seal on her future educational development and success. It is vital, therefore, that we at PSM strive to make the initial contact and early years of education enjoyable, secure and productive. It is equally important that we build the essential positive relationships with parents to facilitate each child reaching her potential.

Our classes in this Department are small, thus enabling each child to have individual tuition as well as being taught as part of a group. This allows each child to develop at her own rate and affords us the opportunity to tailor the curriculum to her needs. Much of the curriculum is taught through topics so that the children can see the interdependence of each subject with another, for example story writing with an historical theme or a scientific survey presented as a mathematical graph.

The children have opportunities to develop their other talents: from Reception they can join the extra-curricular activities such as yoga classes and dance classes in ballet, tap and street dance or in Year 1 have speech and drama lessons. In Year 2 individual instrumental lessons are available. Music, Gymnastics, ICT, Drama and French are taught as part of the curriculum from Reception onwards by subject specialists.

Although we are a Christian Foundation, we are a multicultural school and take pride in celebrating our diversity through sharing the different festivals in assemblies, stories or by tasting representative food, e.g. apple and honey at Rosh Hashanah. All the children in the Infant Department dramatise the Nativity, to which the parents are cordially invited. We mark other Christian festivals through school assemblies and Harvest, which is universal to all religions, is held as a service and again parents may attend. Many of the children and their families take part in our annual Christmas Carol Service at a local church.

To extend and consolidate their learning the children are taken on a variety of outings. They not only have 'hands on' experience of an area of the curriculum they have been studying but they also learn how to conduct themselves in public and be ambassadors of our school.

We are always available to parents if you wish to discuss anything. We hope, with your help, to create an atmosphere of joy, wonder, excitement and security combined with a carefully structured education programme to enable your child to walk confidently through life.