As you will have seen across our website and social media, we have just opened up our second Muddy Boots Nursery, which is on the grounds of Westfield Primary school. Although the site was already the home to a nursery when we moved in, we really wanted to give it our Muddy Boots look and feel. This week we are in final stages of the renovation process, and so wanted to share the journey so far with you and show you some pictures!
At Muddy Boots we design our spaces to best support our curiosity approach to learning, which means they have a very distinct look & feel. With this in mind, we started the renovation by replacing flooring, clearing clutter and painting walls, to give the spaces a brighter, more open look and feel.
One of the more major changes have made is a switch in rooms between our babies & pre-school. Our really little ones now have a huge open space with their own garden, and our preschoolers have a room which offers more sectioned off spacers for specific use, as well as an outdoor free flow garden, and direct access to our huge pioneer’s garden complete with a mini forest to explore!
Another large change was opening up the space in our Pioneers Club (our out of school hours club) by removing a dividing wall to ensure easy free flow play. The last room to tackle is Investigators, which is getting its makeover, along with the corridor space this week. All rooms have been fitted with new kitchens, complete with fridges & dishwashers to make snack times as smooth as possible.
You can read more on another one of our recent blogs here, but we really believe in the curiosity approach to learning, so we have been developing our environments and enhancing our resources to create areas which are full of intrigue and spark questions and interest. Our resources are often open ended so that children can use them how they wish, and our spaces are also full of real-life objects, some which children are familiar with and other which they won’t be. Again, this raises questions, children can explore these resources and will often make up their own uses for them.
So… as the title of this blog suggests, we are nearly there! We have a few tiny tweaks to the rooms to make, as well the ones which come from just living in them, but other than that we are there. We would like to thank all the families of Muddy Boots Acomb, you have been fantastic! Your kind words about the changes, your patience through technical glitches, and your warm welcome to our team has really been appreciated. We are excited that the refurb is nearly done, and we are starting to find our rhythm together as one big Muddy Boots family!