My first week :) / home corner ideas

[Rubybubbles]

As some of you know, I have moved from childminding into day nursery! first week completed:clapping:

I am putting some changes into the room and would love your input on changing the 'home corner' It currently is a vets (as has been since June:rolleyes: ) (I have taken over as the room leader in 3-5 room)

I am thinking a post office to introduce lots of PSRN as this seems to be the area planning is lacking as was picked up on the ECERS.

But if you had the space would would be your ideas:D ......... there are lots of resources :thumbsup:

[zippy]

Post office sounds good you could get the children to bring in used stamps to involve the parents you could do some ink stamping activities you could also reuse a post box you make at Xmas for them to send cards to each other

[Jods]

what we have is a list of role play/home corner ideas, we then rotate them, we coincide with our theme, or to achieve EYFS, or if the children tire of one thing, some themes can run for weeks and some can be changed twice in a week.

A very good idea is a Foreign food supermarket, a lot of shops (speciality) sell food with labels in different languages, for example we have a tin of beans which came from a polish shop, so has the picture of beans with the polish writing, we have Euro's (photocopies) and Stirling notes laminated, and plastic play coins. we also have laminated shopping lists, which have tick boxes and wipe pens, dressing up, weighing scales, tills shopping baskets, paper pencils, and posters of 5 a day etc.

Supermarket magazines, leaflets, and normal packaging, and play fruit, we do used hard veg like carrots, carrier bags (paper ones for obvious reasons), but when supervised plastic ones are used.

Ofsted really liked this one x

[The Juggler]

PO is good as you buy and sell stuff. You could also have a builders merchants and be measuring and recording with early number mark making, show them how to use a tape measure and introduce significance of numbers, go round measuring tables and chairs etc.:thumbsup:

Just have a big tool box with lots of tools and use all your wooden blocks and lego as the building materials:thumbsup:

[blue bear]

Mine keeps bouncing back to a cafe it's the childrens favourite, laminated menus and order pads. Money and till playfood/real food, plates, tea set, aprons etc turns into a shop with shopping lists / bags etc get extended by lunch out in a real cafe, trips to local shops/supermarket which in turn leads to cooking activities, healthy foods, talking about healthy options turns role play area to chemist etc. I just run with the childrens current interests and build from there everything is flexible

[QualityCare]

Hair dressers, doctor or dentist surgery, hospital, restaurant.

[RainbowMum]

I went to the Nursery world north exhibition yesterday and attended a seminar by Penny Tassoni - she touched on the use of home corners in her speech. She said recent research has shown that many children attending nursery full time did not know the words for common household items such as coaster, pillowcase etc. She said that home corners should be rich in such mundane items. She wasn't saying the children's language skills were poor - they could name many items from around the world but the everyday household language was missing.

A post office is great, I would try and personalise it the children and your area as well. Perhaps children could talk about who they would send a letter to and why. You could have a local street map with some of the post codes on or perhaps allocate a few different postcodes to different areas of the nursery - make address's up like Big Ted, 1 The Sand Tray, Nursery Corner N1 2TB :idea:

[zippy]

Travel agents, opticians (some opticians will give you old frames for free) laundrette, vets.

[Joda]

The nursery I collect from has a transport theme at the moment and their role play corner is now a transport cafe.

[julie w]

I did a hairdressers a few weeks ago. The children loved it. Some straighteners with the cord cut off, velcro rollers etc. Not realising one child had headlice. We were all infested a week later :blush: Therefore a post office sounds good:D