Our Early years Intent and Implementation.

Intent

We offer and exciting and engaging broad and balanced early Years curriculum to provide our children with knowledge and skills to learn, investigate and enquire.

We meet the needs of our children through ensuring the inclusion of

• Difference: Our children learn to respect, understand and tolerate difference within and beyond the school environment.
• Possibilities:  Our children are supported to make considered choices about their future and their role in the world around them.
• Self-direction:  We aim for all our children to be able to independently tackle, explore, research and embrace new experiences.

These 3 areas drive the planning and implementation of our curriculum.

We follow the Statutory Framework 2017 requirements for learning and development and the children will be working towards reaching the Early Learning Goals. 

We recognise that all children come into our setting with varied experiences and staff work hard to ensure the learning opportunities provided embrace children’s interests and widen their knowledge and understanding of the world, setting ambitious expectations for all children.

Implementation

Our curriculum is delivered through

• Carefully planned sequences of activities developing each child’s characteristics of learning.
• Providing high quality interactions with adults that impact on the progress of all children.
• Providing clear and consistent boundaries that develop positive relationships with adults and their peers.
• Use high quality questioning that challenge and address misconceptions.
• Carefully assessing, through observations, which are recorded on Tapestry and shared with parents. Then using these to inform the next steps in learning.
• Developing an effective and engaging environment that is set up so that children can access all areas of learning both inside and outside at any time.
• Providing starting points for child initiated activities that enhance learning and impact on progress. Recognising that every child is unique and that learning takes place at their own pace.
• Suggesting home learning opportunities with information about what is being taught, allowing parents to build on their child’s learning experiences at home.

The English curriculum is taught using Talk 4 Writing.  Children develop their literacy skills by the imitation of stories that they learn using actions and story mapping techniques.   They then move on to innovation of these stories by including their own ideas.  Children also have the opportunity to plan and write their own stories and this is also included as part of our continuous provision.

Phonics is taught daily. Nursery children are supported through literacy and reading starting at phase 1 with the introduction of sounds, through ‘sound of the week’ activities and group circle time to promote listening and attention skills. This ensures a good foundation for their reception year where they are introduced to phase 2 and 3, then phase 4 when they are ready. Phonics is taught interactively using jolly phonic actions, puppets, song and rhyme. Phonics is then supported by fine motor activities to encourage letter formation that are set up in the continuous provision and teacher led. Children take part in finger gym, dough disco and mark making using different media and materials.

The maths curriculum is taught using white Rose.  There is a daily maths input led by the teacher followed up by activities set up within the continuous provision. White Rose focuses on maths mastery using interactive and practical activities to introduce children to number, shape, space and measure.

Each week the children take part in forest school style activities using the area around our school.  All areas of learning are encompassed within these sessions and allow all children to take risks in an unpredictable environment whilst developing leadership skills and promoting mental health and wellbeing. Children also take part in mindfulness activities such as yoga, ‘wake and shake’ and singing and stories.

The PE curriculum is supported by our extensive outdoor learning environment which provides space for the children to be active, developing their co-ordination, control and movement. We plan the environment so that all the children are able to access the environment and the range of activities encourages the children to take part in physical activity. Our outdoor environment provides both fixed and moveable structures to develop the children’s skills. There is adequate space where children have the opportunity to play with ride on toys, bikes and scooters. The children have access to other resources such as tyres, crates, large blocks, guttering and planks so that they can create their own climbing and balancing structures. We provide hoops, different sized balls, bats and bean bags to enable the children to gain control in pushing, patting, throwing, catching and kicking objects. The outdoor resources provide continuous provision through sand, water, large scale water play, a mud and sand kitchen, messy play, chalks, mathematics, mark making, construction and physical activities. We also help the children to understand the importance of physical activity by teaching to maintain a healthy lifestyle through PE and cooking sessions run by the teachers.

The children have opportunities to visit the wider surroundings of the school and to go out into the local community for walks. The children are provided with real hands on experiences through the setting providing opportunities for the children to observe chicks, lambs, caterpillars changing into butterflies and having a variety of pets and animals visiting the setting over the year. We welcome visitors into the setting to support learning, recent themes have seen local community police officers, dentist and farmers.