Early Years

Empowering Learners...Growing Minds

 

We aim to...

At Kidsgrove Primary School, we pride ourselves on building relationships with children and their families, to ensure the very best outcomes for all through our engaging and magical learning environment, to support, enhance and to invite each child’s curiosity, confidence, and individual competency to flourish, regardless of background, circumstance or needs, ensuring that each child’s achievements are recognised, valued and praised.

Our home-from-home, warming approach gives the children opportunities to learn, make choices and decisions and develop self-awareness, confidence and to be independent learners, working with parents, carers and families to ensure the best outcomes for all.

In line with our whole school values, our EYFS Nursery and Reception Curriculum has been designed to support pupils to develop confidence and independence and to be resilient learners. The design of the curriculum encourages pupils to build respectful relationships and communicate effectively with each other. It is carefully planned to enable pupils to make connections between home and school life, prior knowledge and new learning and begin to make links with the wider community. Children are encouraged to explore their own ideas, fascinations and interests and express their individuality, communicating their thoughts and ideas verbally, through drawing, mixed media and in writing.

Our ambitious and progressive EYFS curriculum aims to enable all children to develop the knowledge, skills and understanding they should acquire by the end of the Reception year in order to become confident, self-assured, independent learners, ready for KS1.

It is our intent that children who enter our EYFS begin their lifelong learning journey by developing physically, verbally, cognitively, and emotionally whilst also embedding a positive attitude to school and a love of learning.

To ensure that children make outstanding progress at Kidsgrove Primary School, in the Early Years Foundation Stage, we take into consideration the starting points and needs of pupils as they begin their journey. Every child has access to a broad balanced and adapted curriculum, based on needs and individual interests, which prepares them for now and in the future.

Our EYFS Curriculum has been designed to:

  • Support children’s transition to Reception and then KS1.
  • Learn about themselves, and other important people in their lives, including in the school, their family and the local community.
  • Teach the children how their environment compares to other places, cultures and nature in their local community and other parts of the world.
  • Allow children to express and explore their interests and use this to build on next steps.

As a result, each planned topic is included in the curriculum for very specific reasons, building upon children’s prior knowledge. We want to ensure that all children leaving the Reception year are ready to start the KS1 curriculum. Although our curriculum includes six half-termly focus areas, we are responsive to the children’s learning needs and interests and will adapt our EYFS curriculum in order to meet the needs of our youngest learners. All the topics have resources and activities ready to use in the continuous and enhanced provision, both indoors and out. The topics are introduced with a good-quality text, which helps children learn the value and importance of books and reading and promotes a love for reading.

Our curriculum aims enable children to be:

  • Competent and creative learners who are curious about the world around them.
  • Secure and confident, who enjoy coming to school and learning new skills and knowledge building on their existing learning.
  • Skilful communicators, who connect with others through language and play, ensuring that they are exposed to a vocabulary and language rich environment.

Implementation

At Kidsgrove Primary, we have worked together to create a bespoke curriculum that follows the Early Years Statutory Framework and modified it to create our own learning checkpoints throughout the year, that are progressive from the entry point in Nursery, through to the Early Learning Goals at the end of Reception, also linking to the National Curriculum subjects in Year One. Through the Development Matters framework, our checkpoints allow for all adults to know each child’s progress and next steps throughout the year. They are shared with children and parents/carers, ensuring the best standard of education and welfare, for ALL children, regardless of their age, stage, and level of need.

We ensure that our curriculum and learning opportunities closely target each of the seven areas of learning in both prime and specific areas, to ensure school readiness and to promote independence.

Prime areas 

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

Specific areas 

  • Literacy
  • MathematicsUnderstanding the world
  • Expressive Arts and Design
  • We have modified the EYFS Statutory Framework to create our very own tailored, bespoke curriculum to challenge and to support children. Each half term we introduce, through a text, a new theme to provide enthusiasm and inspiration for new learning.
  • Through play, we acknowledge the importance of oracy, and we consistently use the motto ‘I know more, I remember more’-which allows for the child to remember and recall prior learning, through adult led sessions and, in the language and vocabulary rich provision through facilitation. We use a range of magical teaching strategies and styles across the Nursery and Reception, ensuring that children are engaged, enthusiastic and develop a love for learning. Adults are consistently engaged with, and modelling to our children, how to play and learn. Our children leave our EYFS with a completely positive attitude to school and learning.
  • We use the observation-plan-assess cycle to establish where our children are, what they need and what we need to implement in order for the child to achieve developmentally and personally. Children learn through a range of child initiated, adult guided and adult led activities, based on the areas of the curriculum, adapted for individual need and child interest.
  • We recognise that each child is unique, and we pride ourselves on the relationships we form with each child as an individual and their families. As EYFS practitioners, modelling is a fundamental factor of our practice, which is consistent with all adults across the Foundation Stage. We model high levels of vocabulary and thinking skills to support our children’s development.
  • Reading is at the forefront of our curriculum. We have based our curriculum around Nursery Rhymes and engaging, high quality texts. We ensure that the ‘love for reading’ is at the heart of everything we do. High quality books are embedded in our provision, indoors and out, through activities and story sessions and children are emersed into a world of imagination, wherever they are learning, through their experiences of books. Children are exposed to a wide range of books and our well-matched phonics scheme ‘Essential Letters and Sounds’ can be accessed on the children’s iPads, which they access in school and at home, which mirrors our phonics sessions in school.
  • Our curriculum is carefully planned, based on child interest and developmental need with the Characteristics of Effective Learning at the forefront.
  • Playing and Exploring, Active Learning and Creating and Thinking Critically
  • Leaders work with teaching staff to ensure we have planned thematic areas and learning outcomes, based on what we want children to learn. Thread through the curriculum are the
  • celebration of many religions- where Nursery and Reception join together to celebrate, providing opportunity for families to join us too.
  • We strive to ensure that our children become confident, independent, enthusiastic, and curious learners, who build a solid love for learning. Learning is recorded in our very special learning journeys and digitally on ‘Class Dojo’ ensuring all parents can celebrate their child’s success daily. This allows for a personal, unique celebration of each child’s journey throughout our EYFS. Parents and families become fully engaged within this journey and are actively encouraged to share any learning experiences from outside the setting.
  • Learning is based upon prior knowledge, which is ambitious and progressive as children revisit topics within the next EYFS class to embed and build upon this. This makes supporting progression very individual and personal to each child, allowing for the best outcomes for all.

Impact

When children join us at Kidsgrove Primary, we spend time meeting/communicating with the children, families, and will often visit/communicate with previous settings to gather a full picture of the child, their likes, and dislikes and where they are currently working in relation to age related expectations.

During the first few weeks, all EYFS children are baselined through observation. Reception children are assessed on the Statutory National Baseline Assessment (The RBA). This statutory assessment focusses on Language, Communication and Literacy and Mathematics, and the purpose of this is to show progress from Reception to Key Stage 2- their personal journey throughout the whole school. Alongside the relationship building and the observations, this identifies a starting point in all areas for the child, allowing us to plan experiences that are accurate to ensure progress can be made by all. Learning is adapted and relationships are tight. We work a lot on the Prime areas of learning to ensure friendships, values and communication are at the heart of a settling transition.

We have strong links with Speech and Language therapists to ensure that we are quickly implementing speech and language sessions if required, and we pride ourselves on early identification of SEND needs within our EYFS.

All children are assessed through formative assessment daily through the provision during observations and teacher judgements and then targeted in the provision, where misconceptions are addressed and corrected.

Summative assessments are completed three times per year to track progress and to inform planning. In Summer term 2 the EYFSP (Early Years Foundation Stage Profile) is completed by the class teacher, who judges whether children have met each Early Learning Goal. They will be assessed as ’emerging’ or ‘expected’ and children will reach a Good Level of Development (GLD) if all of the prime areas, literacy, and mathematics have been assessed as ‘expected’. Parents will receive a report of this.

This supports the child’s transition to Year One, where teachers will liaise with the Year One staff to ensure that any important information, development points and any adaptive teaching strategies/reasonable judgements that are required are shared.

Across the EYFS at Kidsgrove Primary, we strive to ensure all learners, including those who are disadvantaged/with Special Educational Needs/disabilities, achieve the best possible outcome and leave the Early Years school ready, with a love for school and high aspirations of themselves.