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.