Our aim in the Early YearsFoundation stage is to support children to gain the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to have a successful journey through their school life and beyond. We offer a high-quality inclusive early education to all our children
We have strong belief that all children will make progress with the right help. We offer a variety of approaches in our classroom including:
Child Initiated Play Well planned environments indoors and outside where our children can use their experiences and recreate their own role play and small world play, ensuring the prime areas communication, personal social and emotional and physical development are supported as well as the specific areas of learning for literacy, maths, understanding the world and expressive arts and design.
Adult Modelling New activities are modelled to the children daily and expectations of their learning is explored.
Guided Learning Each week the children have 5-6 rainbow challenges to complete in their own time to allow them to fully engage with all the areas of continuous provision. The children also learn through regular group work guided by their teacher.
Direct teaching All areas of learning will receive direct teaching which includes communication, personal social and emotional development, physical development, Literacy, Maths, understanding the world and expressive arts and design
Children Don’t Know What They Don’t Know We aim to strike a balance between teacher directed and child initiated learning, whilst maintaining a child’s self chosen and exploratory play.
We aim to support children to:
Hold Information In Their Mind We read stories daily to children and support them in repeating phrases and learning new vocabulary. We use Read Write inc strategies of repetition. We also ensure children are able to have a large library of songs and nursery rhymes which they can remember.
Focus Their Attention We have high expectations of our children and provide them with engaging learning to enable them to listen and attend during their learning. Regulate their behaviour: We have high expectations of behaviour and focus on positively reinforcing good behaviour.
Plan What To Do Next To enable children to plan their learning we provide children with regular updates and modelling of how they can access the continuous provision, we provide weekly challenges for the children to plan their learning.
To enable self regulation we support children to:
Focus Their Thinking By providing children with routines and visual timetables of the day. Children also have Read Write Inc and maths daily and this follows a structured learning programme to enable them to focus their thinking.
Monitor and Adapt What They Are Doing Our Early educators work with the children in the different areas of continuous provision and will teach and model new ways of doing things and ask appropriate questions of the children. We will also provide the resources the children need.
Regulate Their Strong Feelings We have weekly Jigsaw learning which follows a developmental learning path to support feelings and personal and social development. Adults in the setting will also support all children with their feelings and are mindful of children’s developmental stages and how their feelings can be explored.
Be Patient For What They Want We have a very caring Early Years and aim to satisfy all children, however there are times when children learn to be patient and wait their turn or need to wait for an adult and we make it a positive experience and provide visual clues, use timers and visual timetables We give children the information they need to understand.
Bounce Back When Things Get Difficult We havean understanding that children will find things difficult and we aim to support them in recovering from difficulties by helping and supporting and giving them strategies to cope.
Our curriculum follows a plan of everything we want our children to learn.
We develop language skills and vocabulary within all areas of learning. We have ambitious aims for all our children ensuring a developmentally sequenced progression to build their learning over time.
Planning is flexible to allow for children to follow their interests as we believe children in Early Years gain more understanding if they are fully emersed, engaged and enjoy their learning. We believe in depth of learning to ensure our children gain as much from the experiences as possible and their learning deepens.
We believe assessment is about what the children can do and what they know, we gather this evidence through incidental observations using Class Dojo, guided learning and parental views. Our early educators make accurate assessments of our children on a daily basis and use these assessments regularly to inform our planning and delivery of the learning.
We believe in having strong respectful relationship with parents. We listen regularly to parents about their child’s progress and communicate well with parents using virtual and face to face meetings. We encourage parents to chat, play and read with their children and provide information weekly about the learning in the classroom, including the stories we are reading using our communication platform, Class Dojo. Parents are encouraged to add experiences to the class platform to share with teachers. Weekly the staff will share the specific learning with parents including the vocabulary we are using for our talk through stories.
By the time children leave Reception, they will listen attentively and ask questions; be able to hold conversations with adults and friends, showing them empathy; and have the confidence to try new things, make up stories and perform. Crucially, they will have developed a love of stories and see themselves as readers while ever-deepening their understanding and fascination of number and problem solving.
