Early Years, Ballycastle Nursery School

Ballycastle Nursery School is the North-Eastern Board’s most northerly school only 16 miles from Scotland! The school was established in 1970 with Mrs Anna Campbell as its first principal and is housed in a converted National School building built in 1880. It is a welcoming place with lots of character where pupils feel at home.

 

The school caters for 26 children from all cultural and religious backgrounds and offers a full day session. Places are allocated by the Board of Governors according to strict criteria laid down by the Department of Education. Most of the children come from a walking radius of 1 mile.

 

All pupils are settled in gently and by the end of September are completing a 4 ½ hour session which includes a nourishing hot meal. The classroom staff are teaching principal Mrs J A Cavalleros BA. AdvDipEd. ACNE and Miss Nina McMullan nursery assistant. Both take part in regular up-dating training and also hold First Aid certificates. The nursery curriculum follows the developmentally appropriate Nursery Guidelines of Department of Education and a copy of the curriculum is available to view in the school as are all other required policies.

 

Parents are encouraged to be part of their child’s education process and so daily arrival and departure activities are planned to include the parents. In this way parents are always aware of their child’s progress and potential problems are quickly sorted out. Also parents are welcome to spend a full structured day being part of their child’s activities involving themselves in choice of activity, tidy up, music, story, having their dinner, language time and formal end-the-day activity be it block construction, puzzles, cutting and pasting, finger toys, pencil use. By the summer term children are ready to pay a weekly visit to the library where parents meet them and arrange to borrow books.

 

Outdoor play is a vital part of the curriculum with the large tarmac area and the excellent grass area used daily. Many activities including dinner are moved outside whenever possible.

 

Previous pupils have taken part in a televised Telethon event and most recently Frank the Weatherman on UTV used a photograph of the children wearing legionnaire sun-hats as part of his ‘cover up in the sun’ campaign. Other individual pupils have gone on to win major national art prizes e.g. Blue Peter and a large proportion of the school’s past pupils continue to ‘A’ level studies.

 

By the end of their nursery year it is expected that pupils will have acquired the skills and strategies needed to take full advantage of their continuing education.

 

"School success is not predicted by a child’s fund of facts or a precocious ability to read so much as by social and emotional measures; being self-assured and interested; knowing what kind of behaviour is expected and how to rein in impulse to misbehave, being able to wait, to follow directions and to turn to adults and peers for help; expressing needs whilst getting on with other children."
(Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence)