Watch as Sunderland Echo reporter enjoys a day in the life of a nursery teacher at Stepping Stones Day Nursery in Washington

Delivering lessons on plate tectonics or coastal erosion to my Year 11 GCSE students was a very different proposition to dealing with dirty nappies, toilet training and toddler tantrums.

Mind you, with a 16-month-old and a soon to be four-year-old of my own, I wasn’t without recent experience of what potentially lay ahead.

The nursery was recently judged as good following its latest Ofsted inspection and I was assigned to the pre-school section where on my arrival a group of three and four-year-olds were getting creative and enjoying showing off their artistic skills with a range of drawings.

"This is a drawing of my hand” and “I like to draw rainbows”, I was confidently told by one little girl.

"I love coming to this nursery and the best bit is making things,” I was informed by her friend.

Wondering what they were making of the arrival of their unexpected guest, I decided to explore the outside play area where the children were constructing a range of structures with their building blocks.

Asking one of the infants if I could help with his tower construction I was quickly and firmly corrected that it was “Pterodactyl’s head” while another said he was “building a Tyrannosaurus Rex”.

Both boys then took up my offer of a dinosaur roar off with their subsequent roars reverberating off the space hoppers and nearby sandpit.

Next up it was the parachute game where I joined the children practising their coordination skills to keep the ball in the canopy before being volunteered to sit in the middle of the parachute where children pretended to cover me in water before vigorously shaking the canvas to “get me dry”.

It was soon time to return inside where I would be helping the children to make their cakes.

“I love strawberry cake”, “my favourite is chocolate cake”, two children proclaimed as I took my place at the table.

As the flour, eggs, butter and sugar were passed around the table, the little girl next to me let me know it “would be my turn next”.

Cakes in the oven, it was time for a story and the children chose for me to read the beautifully rhyming A Squash and a Squeeze by Julia Donaldson.

Seeing the children engrossed in the story and their beaming faces at the end reminded me of why I had enjoyed my career as a teacher, the rewarding satisfaction of which was shared by the dedicated staff at the nursery.

SEE ALSO: Learning tops the menu for mother and daughter at new Little Lane Adventures play cafe in Easington Lane

Zoe, who has worked as a nursery practitioner for 11 years, said: “It’s such a rewarding job. It’s like being part of another family and it’s fantastic to see what the children achieve. Their first little steps and words as babies, and I love just seeing them coming in smiling each day.”

I didn’t expect to find a new respect for the role after a day in the life of a nursery practitioner. With a child already in nursery it’s something I already had.

All this experience has done is reaffirm just what a crucial role staff at Stepping Stones and other nurseries play in laying the foundations for teachers like me in my previous career to build upon what they has instilled during this vital foundation stage.

They really do lay the building blocks on which others can build.

During his recent Spring Budget the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt singled out the importance of affordable childcare for working parents and the UK’s economy and this needs to be reflected in a level of funding which enables these highly skilled professionals to be able to be paid inline with similar sectors of education.