Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)

Intent

Here at Whittingham, we provide our youngest children with a welcoming, warm and stimulating environment, where they feel safe, secure and have a sense of belonging. We enable children to feel confident about themselves, build positive relationships with peers and staff within an inclusive setting. 

The EYFS Curriculum is built upon, learning through play and exciting challenges, whilst also placing, personal, social and emotional development and attitudes and behaviours at its core. The curriculum is designed to allow for diverse and differentiated outcomes to be developed for each pupil. This aims to ensure that a strong foundation is developed and that this serves as a solid basis for a child’s learning journey. As such, every child is carefully nurtured to aspire to be a forever reader, learner and researcher! 

Our curriculum provides firsthand experiences and promotes learning through purposeful play, allowing children to become independent, resilient, and curious learners. The teaching of key basic skills alongside a language enriched, high quality, continuous and enhanced provision prepares children for the next stage of their learning.

Implementation

Children in the Early Years follow the EYFS curriculum which gives children a broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundations for good future progress through school and life. Our curriculum is language rich and each of our topics uses inspiring stories as starting points.

The EYFS curriculum is a programme of learning opportunities towards a set of Early Learning Goals. These goals outline the skills, understanding, knowledge and attitudes that are expected at the end of the EYFS.

Children learn and hone new skills and knowledge and demonstrate their understanding through seven areas of learning and development. The EYFS is organised into 7 areas of learning:

Prime Areas:

• Communication and Language
• Physical Development
• Personal, Social and Emotional Development

Specific Areas:

• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the World
• Expressive Arts and Creative Designs

The EYFS curriculum reflects the, Characteristics of Effective Learning, dovetailing with the prime and specific areas. There is also a strong focus on personal, social and emotional needs and language skills development.

Playing and exploring

We provide daily opportunities for children to learn through play and adults support children by holding high quality discussions around children’s thinking. When learning through play children are given opportunities to explore and develop learning experiences, which help them make sense of the world. They learn how to control themselves and understand the need for rules. They can think creatively alongside other children as well as on their own, communicate with others as they investigate, solve problems and learn.

Active Learning

We have a balance of adult-initiated and child-initiated activities. Phonics, mathematics, reading and literacy lessons are adult-led, and opportunities are followed up with a rich provision of activities and resources for children to consolidate and extend their learning through play. This encourages independence, control over their learning and, most importantly, enjoyment: developing a love of learning. We provide children with challenges to advance their learning and encourage them to use the new skills and knowledge they have been taught.

Creativity and Critical Thinking

When children have opportunities to explore their ideas in different situations, using a variety of resources, they discover connections and come to a better understanding, adapting and developing new ways of doing things. Adults support this process and enhance their ability to think critically and ask questions. Children are given time to test out their ideas and discuss their discoveries with others, sharing their understanding and knowledge.

Children are observed carefully by adults: learning and progress is tracked and next steps are identified for all children.

At Whittingham the children in the EYFS are provided with the foundations of knowledge needed to thrive and succeed in their future. Our enriching and diverse learning environments both indoors and outside, allow all our children to explore and experiment through play whilst being scaffolded and supported by the adults to push their thinking further.

Reading

Reading for pleasure is also paramount and books have been carefully chosen, to reflect every child and ignite an interest in stories and knowledge. We also believe that writing should always be for a purpose and have interwoven a plethora of exciting opportunities for writing, throughout the curriculum. Furthermore, the pupils will be exposed to new writing styles and genres. As they progress through EYFS, pupils will produce a variety of outcomes across all curriculum areas and in a wide range of topics. These outcomes also cover a diverse range of subject matter. Learners will also be immersed in a range of fiction, non-fiction, which allows pupils to think creatively about their composition, as well as learning about themselves and facilitating a thirst for knowledge about the world around them.

The curriculum has a strong emphasis on early reading and links with the RWI systematic reading programme, ensuring that the key concepts of early reading and early writing are practised, revisited and developed. This ensures there are no gaps in learning and pupils are given opportunities for repetition. The learning environment, and continuous provision, is consciously designed and enriched with vocabulary. Children will have opportunities to immerse themselves in vocabulary across all the areas of learning.   Vocabulary, both contextual within topics and vocabulary building, is taught discreetly every day. This is done in a way that ensures pupils are maximising their vocabulary, understanding of key vocabulary and spelling, this is to ensure success for every ‘early learner’.

Mathematics

Following the White Rose mathematics teaching sequence encourages mathematical thinking and reasoning skills to develop and ensures that pupils are consistently challenged. Each mathematical concept is delivered in a fun, exciting and thought-provoking way. This approach aims to create opportunities for children to learn, discover and practise each skill many times, in many different ways. Children are encouraged to fully immerse themselves in each concept in order to fully understand it. This ensures that a strong foundation of mathematical concepts is developed.

Wider Curriculum

The wider curriculum is organised into half termly topics that link with the Early Learning Goals. Each topic is based around a stimulus, whether it be a book, a poem, a piece of music etc. This means that children are quickly immersed in the subject’s content and context. All areas of learning are covered and make links with a child’s immediate world, self and experiences. 

Impact

The impact of our curriculum is measured by assessment procedures which allow us to measure outcomes against all schools nationally. We measure the percentage of pupils achieving a ‘Good level of development’ (GLD) by the end of the Reception year.

The impact of our curriculum will also be measured by how effectively it helps our pupils develop into well-rounded individuals who uphold strong positive values and carry the knowledge, skills and attitudes which will make them lifelong learners and valuable future citizens.

When children leave Reception, not only are they ready for Year One, but Every child should also be seen as a budding flower to be carefully nurtured. We will facilitate the growth of each child towards becoming well-rounded and insightful individuals.

Curriculum Overview

  

Learning at Home

We consider ourselves partners in your child’s learning. The activities that you do with your child at home are important in supporting their learning and development and have a long-lasting effect on your child’s learning as they progress through school. For example, talking, listening, reading, singing nursery rhymes, cooking and playing outside with them are all incredibly valuable activities that should be taking place at home.

Each child’s journey through the Early Years Foundation Stage is recorded in their online ‘Learning Journey’ and parents are encouraged to have an input into these to share in this journey too.