Intent

Our curriculum is designed to provide a broad and balanced education that meets the needs of all pupils. It facilitates them to gain the skills, knowledge and understanding, as they start out on their educational journey, supporting them to progress from their individual starting points and preparing them for the next stage of their education.

Our ethos in Early Years is to support children’s personal, social and emotional development so that they feel safe and secure and are ready to learn.

Through the seven areas of learning, we provide themes that excite and engage children, building on their own interests and developing their experiences of the world around them. We recognise that all children come into our setting with varied experiences and all staff work hard to ensure that the learning opportunities we provide widen their knowledge and understanding of the world as well as setting ambitious expectations for all children.

Our curriculum celebrates diversity and supports the pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. Those children with particular needs, including SEND, are supported appropriately allowing them to be successful.

Implementation

The aim of our curriculum is to develop a thirst and love for learning by:

• Carefully planning sequences of activities that provide meaningful learning experiences and developing each child’s characteristics of learning.

• Providing high quality interactions with adults that demonstrate and impacts the progress of all children.

• Using high quality questioning and interactions to check understanding and address misconceptions.

• Staff acting as role models to the children they teach in order for children to develop their own speaking and listening skills.

• Carefully assessing, through observations, guided work and play partnering. These are used to inform the next steps of learning and meet individual needs.

• 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 one time.

• Providing activity starting points for child initiated activities that enhance children’s learning and impact on progress.

• Allowing children to be successful in their attempts at an activity and using effective feedback to help facilitate next steps in learning.

• Suggesting home learning opportunities with information about what has been taught, allowing parents to build on their child’s school experiences, at home.

We recognise the changing needs and interests of our pupils and we are responsive to this by regularly developing existing topics.

Our Early Years uses core texts as a basis for thematic planning and usually start with an exciting hook to engage children in both the topic and the book. These texts are chosen for their level of challenge and quality language. They have also been chosen with a view to promoting reading for pleasure and an opportunity for children to learn new vocabulary and meanings of words.

Phonics is taught daily through a systematic synthetic phonics approach. The phonics activities are revisited to embed over the year and supported in a range of ways through our continuous provision.

The maths curriculum is taught through dedicated sessions. These sessions are carefully planned using concrete resources and build on prior learning and real life experiences across the theme and year. This starts with mastering numbers 0-3 and then progresses through to 0-10 and 0-20. We want our children to become confident mathematicians who can apply what they have learnt to real life experiences.

All seven areas of learning are encompassed within our thematic curriculum and allow all children to revisit and reinforce learning as well as giving the children opportunities to explore new learning and new experiences.

Children have opportunities to share their learning with their parents and carers through our regular ‘Work Shop’ sessions, allowing parents to join in learning activities alongside their children and share experiences. Parents are invited in to look at the children’s learning journeys and leave WOW moments and Proud Clouds with positive comments.

Impact

Children demonstrate high levels of engagement in activities, developing their speaking and listening skills, enabling them to access more areas of the learning and communicate to both adults and children. Children develop skills across all areas of the curriculum including literacy, mathematics and physical development using these in different ways.

Children have developed a wider sense of the world around them and can draw on these experiences during interactions with others and link this to new learning.

Children develop their characteristics of learning and are able to apply their knowledge to a range of situations making links and explaining their ideas and understanding. Children are confident to take risks and discuss their successes and failures with adults drawing on their experiences to improve or adjust what they are doing.

From their own starting points, children will make excellent progress academically and socially, developing a sense of themselves so that they are well prepared for Key Stage 1.