You know your child best, so working closely with you to give them the care and attention they need is crucial to us. At Monkey Puzzle Golders Green, we take consistent steps to ensure we are taking the lead in improving parent communication and partnership.

Whether it is through annual surveys and year round suggestion tools or through new developments such as Android/iPhone apps and text reminders we want to keep every parent as informed as possible. Here are some of the things we do to keep you engaged and informed:

Coffee Mornings and Parent Volunteering

We regularly arrange coffee mornings to help new parents get to know the existing ones. We find it also helps parents form friendships and have playdates outside the nursery. Parents are often invited via monthly newsletters to volunteer at cultural events and talk to the children about their backgrounds. We also have parents help out at Forest School and Cooking Clubs.

Learning Books

We use a progress monitoring software called Learning Book to help record important moments in your child’s development against the Early Years Curriculum. Learning Books is an extremely safe system that helps our practitioners to make regular high quality observations on their key children to track their learning. These include photos, videos and descriptions of your child at play, with information about their next steps and progress term on term.

We also provide parents with their own logging in information which allows them to view all the observations made by our practitioners of their child. Our parents have fed back that they love having the ability to watch how their children get on at the nursery on a regular day. Another advantage is that if a parent or grandparent lives or works too far away from your child, then they can still learn a lot about them in their own time and use this as a basis to keep or develop their relationship with the child. You can also see your child’s baseline, summative reports and next steps on the system and best of all, you can contribute to them yourself from home! You also get to take a copy at the end of your child’s time with us.

You can find out more about Learning Book through the Learning Book website.

To access your information about your child, you can log in to the Learning Books Parent Portal.

Monthly Newsletters

We issue brief, informative newsletters every month to update parents on key dates, what to expect at the nursery this month, how to get involved and any important messages, reminders or staffing updates. This is a useful document you can also access through the phone app and gives you suggestions on how to support your child at home, the theme of learning at the nursery and any extracurricular visits planned such as doctors, dentists, external trips, animal encounters etc – all of which we have regularly!