A DEE Valley establishment is the first to sign up for an adventure.

Corwen Day Nursery attends the Nursery World Show in London recently and it is the first setting in Wales to sign up to “Adventures with Alice”.

The nursery believes that its proficient team is its main asset and has always invested heavily in training in order to be able to deliver high quality care and give their children the best start in life and to prepare them for school.

The rural bilingual nursery has been attending the Nursery World Show in London for several years, along with childcare practitioners from not only the UK, but also Switzerland, Dubai, South Africa and New Zealand to name but a few.

Early years specialist Alice Sharp is always a favourite and has worked with the team at Corwen Day Nursery in the past.

Carmen Roberts Davenport, the owner of Corwen Day Nursery, met up with Alice at the Nursery World Show in London at the beginning of February after attending her seminars on messy play and tinkering and tampering.

Alice and her colleague spoke to Carmen about the Adventures with Alice programme, which over 400 settings have already signed up to and how it would assist Carmen to achieve her goals at the nursery.

Carmen said: “We are a nursery that is striving for excellence and Alice Sharp has already inspired us to make significant changes at the nursery over the past 12 years.

"We constantly provide rich language opportunities and we have removed lots of plastic and replaced it with open ended, authentic real resources and natural materials which provide far more learning opportunities.

"We engage our children in a world where there is lots to discover and we want our children to be confident in their play.

"We support the children to be curious through the play that we offer and because all children are naturally curious, they will be eager to investigate, enquire and make discoveries.

"The Adventures with Alice programme is the perfect tool to develop and inspire my team.

"The one-year programme which is about providing experiences rather than activities consists of videos, magazines and posters and covers six areas of learning; curiosity, connections and relationships, language, thinking, creativity and emotions and wellbeing.”

Alice Sharp, who works with the four Governments of the UK, says that practice needs to change for the children of today and often refers to Guy Claxton, one of the authors of Educating Ruby, what our children really need to learn.

In the book, Guy Claxton states that skilful young children of the future need to be taught all the following: Confidence, curiosity, collaboration, communication, creativity, commitment and craftsmanship.

Nia Lloyd Jones, the manager at Corwen Day Nursery and who attended the Nursery World Show, said: “I have learnt so much again from Penny Tassoni in relation to building children’s vocabulary.

"Carmen is so passionate about books and we are fortunate that we have such a variety at nursery in both Welsh and English.

"I can’t wait to begin the Adventures with Alice programme because I know how passionate Alice is about children having deep learning opportunities with rich resources.

"Alice makes learning so much fun and she will make us reflect, question and improve our setting even further.”

Carmen added: “We look forward to the Nursery World Show every year because we always come back with so many ideas.

"Although costly in terms of our time and price, it truly is an investment worth making.

"The speakers are so inspiring, offer a wealth of knowledge and are experts in their field.

"It is also good to meet the suppliers and view the fantastic resources that they are promoting.

"The big-ticket item that we have invested in this year is a large river bed table which will give the children so much joy when they are investigating water play outdoors.”

For more information on Corwen Day Nursery visit www.corwendaynursery.co.uk or e-mail info@corwendaynursery.co.uk

Alternatively, people can telephone 01490 412231.