The Early Years Foundation Stage
At Mayfield Primary school we believe that every child deserves the best possible start to their school life and the individualised support that enables them to fulfil their full potential. Children's development in their early years has a major impact on their future life. With this in mind we want to ensure that all of our children have high quality learning experiences and feel safe and secure with us. Most of all we want them to have fun, shine in their own unique ways and develop a real love of learning!
THE EARLY YEARS FOUNDATION STAGE CURRICULUM:
The EYFS Curriculum is stauatory for all early years providers in England. It runs from birth to 5 and this ensures that children will make a smooth transition from their pre-school and nursery settings into school, as the principles and practice will be familiar to them.
The EYFS Curriculum seeks to provide:
- Quality and consistency. To ensure that every child makes good progress and no child gets left behind.
- A secure foundation through planning for the learning and development of each individual child.
- Partnership working between home and school.
- Equality of opportunity. Ensuring that every child is included and supported.
OVERARCHING PRINCIPLES:
Our practice in early years is shaped by core principles. These are:
- The unique child. We believe that every child is unique, we learn from them to inform how we teach them. They are at the heart of all we do. We know that every child can be resilient, capable and confident.
- Positive relationships. We know that to develop children as strong and independent learners we need to develop positive and supportive relationships with them and enable them to develop these with their peers. We also know that a strong partnership between home and school is vitally important.
- Enabling environments. We value the importance of a safe space for our children to learn with teaching and support from adults who respond to their individual needs and help them to build their learning over time.
- Learning and development. We know that children develop at different rates, we plan to support each child at their individual stage of development, so they make progress for them. We support all learners including those with additional needs through well planned teaching and provision.
We also believe in the importance of developing children's life long learning skills and we do this through developing the children's characteristics of effective learning.
These include playing and exploring, active learning and creating and thinking critically. These characteristics embody skills such as resilience and perserverance, problem solving, evaluating and questioning. We encourage our children to be inquisitive and pro-active learners who make meaning through engaging in experiences and testing out their own ideas in a range of ways. We take our lead from the children and develop our planning around their needs and interests to ensure that our teaching, and their learning, is meaningful, relevant and of course exciting!
THE EARLY YEARS FOUNDATION STAGE CURRICULUM
The Early Years Curriculum is comprised of seven areas of learning and development, these areas are all important and inter-connected. Each area has its own 'Early Learning Goals' which summarise the knowledge, skills and understanding that all young children should have gained by the end of the reception year. The areas are sub-divided into two groups.
The Prime areas.
These areas are particularly important for building a foundation for igniting children's curiosity and enthusiasm for learning as well as forming supportive relationships to help them thrive! They are:
- Communication and Language
- Physical Development
- Personal, Social and Emotional Development.
The Specific areas:
The specific areas help to strengthen the prime areas through applying their skills. They are:
- Literacy
- Mathematics
- Understanding The World
- Expressive Arts and Design.
To read the Early Learning Goals please see the document below.
THE CURRICULUM IN MORE DETAIL
COMMUNICATION AND LANGUAGE
The development of children's spoken langauge underpins all seven areas of learning and development. It is therefore crucial to ensure our children can express themselves clearly and develop a broad vocabulary. We provide a language rich learning envrionment for our children providing lots of opportunities for sharing ideas through discussion as well as ensuring we expose our children to a vast array of quality texts inlcuding, fiction, non-fiction, poetry and rhymes. We engage our children in conversations around their interests and activities and use visual cues and signs alongside to support children's understanding.
PERSONAL, SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Children's personal, social and emotional development is crucial for children to lead healthy and happy lives. Strong, caring and supportive relationships with adults help children to learn how to understand their feelings and those of others. We support children to develop a postitive sense of self and to have confidence in their own abilities. We want our children to aim high and persist to achieve their goals! We also help children to understand their bodies and learn how to look after them, managing their own needs such as dressing and toileting and developing an understanding of what their bodies need to be strong and healthy. We encourage our children to support one another and celebrate eachother's strengths.
PHYSICAL dEVELOPMENT
Physical activity is vital in children's all-round development, enabling them to pursue happy, healthy and active lives. We support children in developing both their gross motor skills, developing skills such as running, skipping, hopping and climbing as well as their fine motor skills from using tools to holding a pencil to form recognisable letters.
LITERACY
Literacy covers both childrens reading and writing.
Reading consists of two dimensions; language comprehension and word reading. We develop children's language comprehension by immersing them in stories and quality texts and exploring what happens or what might happen next! We also develop vocabulary through picking apart the language used in stories and it's meaning.
To develop children's word reading and writing we follow a systematic phonics teaching approach where the children learn letters and the sounds which link to them. More information on phonics is available in the 'English' area of our website under 'Curriculum'.
MATHEMATICS
Developing a strong grounding in number is essential so that all children develop the necessary building blocks to excel mathematically. We focus primarily on the numbers to 10, developing a deep understanding of numbers, we explore the composite parts of numbers and explore the relationships between them, such as counting patterns. We provide varied and frequent opportunities for children to build and apply their understanding of number exploring practical resources both inside and outside of the classroom. Alongside daily taught mathematics lessons we continually provide mathematical challenges within the environment for the children to access during their own child initiated time.
UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD
Understanding of the world encompasses all of those history, science and geography skills. We aim to provide our children with a wealth of experiences from which they will develop a broad and open-minded view of the world in which they live. We explore our local environment and make the best of our schools surroundings using the local woodland to enhance our understanding of plants, animals and seasonal changes. We also look at other places through stories and sharing experiences, we aim for our children to get a sense of how we are all linked in our world and the ways in which we can look after our planet. We also reflect on different cultures and ways of life and identify the ways in which our lives are similar or different to the lives of others. in addition to this we discuss how our world has changed over time, comparing our lives today with the lives of others in the past.
EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND DESIGN
The children we teach today are going to grow up into a world that we cannot yet imagine! With this in mind the development of children's artistic and cultural awareness supports their imagination and creativity and will help them to respond to an ever changing world! Within Expressive Arts and Design we explore all of the arts, from music and dance to storytelling and role-play to drawing, painting and making in all it's forms!
