Welcome to the Early Years Foundation Stage Unit
In our Foundation Stage Unit, the children can move freely between our exceptionally well resourced rooms, shared creative area, café and outdoor play area making choices and learning to regulate their responses and behaviour. We provide a safe, secure and supervised unit supported by a large team of qualified and experienced early years educators including three early years trained teachers.
The unit enables children and parents to transfer from early years provision into our reception rooms seamlessly. Children are encouraged to take part in groups, explore ideas, and explain their thinking while developing increasing levels of confidence and independence.
Read, Write, Inc Programme
In Early Years, our children begin their reading journey as soon as they enter our Nursery. Teachers in our foundation stage ensure they plan ample opportunities for children to become attuned to the sounds around them in both our indoor and outdoor continuous provision.
Early reading is taught using a systematic approach using the Read, Write, Inc. programme. Children learn to read accurately and fluently with good comprehension. They learn to form each letter, spell correctly and compose their ideas step by step. Lively phonic books are closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and as children re-read stories, their fluency increases.
We want our children to be excited about coming to school and feel safe and valued within our environment; therefore making learning possible.
We pay great attention to the importance of providing a curriculum that is both progressive and stimulating and aim to provide children with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to prepare them for the challenges in Key Stage One and beyond. Our curriculum is planned by highly skilled and experienced teachers and is tailored to the needs of all children, recognising that each has different strengths and preferences for a variety of different learning styles. We understand that every year is different and aim to improve on how the curriculum is delivered by adapting it according to the needs of different cohorts, taking into account what they need to learn and the topics that the children are passionate about.
We strive to ensure that our team continue to maintain high standards of education and continue to nurture and support children and their families from their very first meeting. We recognise that many of our children come from a background of social-disadvantage and enter the school with delayed speech and language skills, including a very limited vocabulary. We have to teach them how to listen, speak and meet the high expectations for behaviour by working together. As such we prioritise personal, social and emotional development and communication and language in our Nursery curriculum. Our adults invest time and energy into planning and creating meaningful learning experiences by helping children to aim high and maximise their learning. Our team are trained to support learning in different ways including guided learning and child initiated play; where staff offer extended periods of play and sustained shared thinking.
Implementation
Our children begin their journey as soon as they enter our Nursery. We recognise that routines are paramount to children’s feeling of safety and belonging. From day one we begin the training of where to keep belongings, how to follow the visual timetable and how we are expected to behave at certain points of the day; making reference to the whole school approach of using our Golden Rules.
To ensure children are able to learn at their best and gain the skills, knowledge and understanding in their education, we embed the right habits in how the children will approach all their learning. This is through the ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning’ from the Early Years guidance which underpins ‘how’ children learn.
Children follow the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum, with seven areas of learning. They learn through a balance of child initiated and adult directed activities. The timetable is carefully structured for both Nursery and Reception where children will be taught individually, in small groups or as a whole class. Through a combination of teacher input, adult directed and child initiated activities, learning is planned to encourage children to develop their learning independently through exploration and challenge. In Reception children have rigorous direct teaching in English, maths and phonics everyday with regular P.E sessions and circle times to focus on PSED. Within these sessions we make reference to the National Curriculum subject names to familiarise them to what they might experience later in Year One. These sessions are followed by group work where children work with a member of staff allowing the adult to systematically check for understanding, identify and respond to misconceptions quickly and provide real-time verbal feedback which results in a strong impact on the acquisition of new learning. Our staff are extremely well organised and the teachers have a vast knowledge of child development and how to plan and sequence lessons in a way that builds on prior knowledge and acknowledges future learning.
In Nursery a strong focus is put supporting children in their communication, language and vocabulary. Discrete sessions are taught in whole group and small group sessions and on a one to one basis. The children are supported in their play by our highly skilled staff to progress in their speech and language and sustained shared thinking.
We understand the integral part the environment plays in children’s learning and in particular, how it fosters independence. We give children plenty of time to engage in uninterrupted ‘exploration’ throughout the variety of experiences carefully planned to engage and challenge them in the provision. The curriculum is planned for the inside and outside classrooms and equal importance is given to learning in both areas. The curriculum is planned in a cross-curricular way to enable all aspects of the children’s development as well as to promote sustained thinking and active learning.
We understand the need for CPD (Continuing Professional Development) for all staff working within our setting. Our Early Years Leader and Early Years teachers provide training and feedback to all staff so that they develop a good subject knowledge in the EYFS curriculum and are effectively supported. We tailor our staff CPD to be early years specific and are focused making the team feel confident in making accurate judgements about where individual children are and how to support them in their next steps of learning.
Impact
We believe our children will:
- Be excited about coming into school and have a positive approach to learning and school.
- Have a rich diet of balanced learning experiences.
- Be well prepared for the next stage in their education, when moving into Year One.
- Be confident communicators.
- Make good progress and in many cases ‘accelerated’ progress during their time in our setting across all areas of learning.
Parental engagement
Chatter Box
We have developed a reading programme to support parents reading and enjoying stories and rhymes at home by taking part in fun activities.
Family Learning
Together families take part in practical workshops alongside qualified early years educators, developing skills that ensure that the relationships between you and your child are healthy, confident and loving. There is opportunity for all parents to share ideas and strategies that are successful while working with your child.
