Personalised book for first day nursery nerves: your child's New Nursery Shoes

What happens in your child's New Nursery Shoes

1. Your child fastens their new shoes at home and practises a tap-tap walk.
2. The shoes carry your child along the path to the nursery door for a cuddle and goodbye.
3. Inside, your child follows their shoes towards an activity and begins to play.
4. Tap-tap steps lead your child through familiar nursery moments, including tidying and a group routine.
5. The same shoes walk back through the front door, ready to tell a grown-up about the day.

How the first page could read

At the front door, your child looked down at two new nursery shoes: one on the left foot, one on the right. Tap, tap, they said on the path. A grown-up gave a cuddle, and your child wondered where those small steps might go today.

Your child’s name, look and little details replace these words, and the whole story is written for their age.

Why this story works

This story keeps the first nursery day close to things a two- to four-year-old can notice: shoes on feet, a path, a door, a familiar goodbye and the walk back home. Rather than making the nursery setting the whole focus, it lets your child track the day through a repeated tap-tap motif. That repetition makes it easy to pause and point at each stage: arriving, finding an activity, joining an everyday routine and leaving. The ending returns to the same shoes at home, giving families a concrete way to talk about what happens between morning and home-time.

Reading it together

• Read the tap-tap words slowly and invite your child to tap their own feet along with the shoes.
• Pause at the goodbye page and talk about the person who will take your child to nursery and collect them afterwards.
• After nursery, revisit the final page and ask your child which part of their day their shoes liked best.

Suggested art style: Coloured pencil

Coloured pencil keeps the shoes, doorstep and nursery objects tactile and easy to spot. You can pick any of the four styles and change the details in the form.