SCOTT - BROADWOOD Early Years
Intent
At Scott-Broadwood, our school value LOVE inspires our motivation to cause children to fall in love with learning and our value BELIEVE drives our ambition to support our children to strive to reach their full potential in life. We aim to nurture and encourage children to view themselves as valuable individuals, to be curious about the world around them and to ACHIEVE their learning goals by engaging in stimulating and challenging play. Our aspiration is that our children transition to year one as confident learners and have the resilience to achieve their goals through perseverance and a determination to try their best whilst celebrating mistakes as a valuable part of the learning journey. We passionately believe in high quality Early Years education to ignite a lifelong love of learning but also to lay the foundations, particularly in language development, phonics and early reading for a strong start to our children’s education.
The EYFS is based on seven areas of learning.
There are three prime areas:
- Personal, social and emotional development
- Physical development
- Communication and language
There are four specific areas:
- Mathematics
- Literacy
- Understanding the world
- Expressive arts and design
Implementation
Our children are nurtured in a secure environment, whilst being allowed to explore, enquire and take risks both inside the classroom and in our dedicated outside learning space and wildlife garden. At Scott Broadwood our curriculum is a healthy balance between a child-initiated and adult-led learning; bringing together the most effective methodologies, alongside a carefully planned continuous provision which evolves daily to meet the needs of each child. The children engage in free-flow play which is carefully planned in order to enable them to take part in rich learning opportunities, as well as experiencing a wide variety of adult-led activities alongside this. Our skilful practitioners take great care to ‘tune-in’ to the children’s play, guiding, supporting and extending to ensure a rich daily learning experience. In Early Years, we build on children’s previous knowledge and experiences by providing engaging opportunities to progress, extend and challenge each child into the next stage of their development. Every day, each child takes part in an adult led phonics or maths focus activity in order to embed the skills which have been learnt during each input. The activities are varied and creative which provide interesting and stimulating opportunities for the children to take part in, whilst learning at their own pace. We understand that successful Early Years education relies on a strong partnership with parents and therefore every parent is given a login to their child’s online learning Journal called Tapestry. Through this site, teachers will upload observations, which link to the above areas of learning. Once uploaded, parents can view the written comments, photos and videos of the children’s learning. Parents can also upload videos, photos and comments to add to the children’s learning journal.
Children are given opportunities to:
- Talk and communicate in a widening range of situations, to respond to adults and each other, to listen carefully and to practise and extend their communication skills.
- Explore words and texts in a vocabulary rich environment with a new story or traditional tale every day to enjoy, to decode and to read for pleasure.
- Enjoy rhymes. Did you know that if children know eight nursery rhymes by the time they're four years old, they're usually among the best readers by the time they're eight? Rhyming helps children to break words down and to hear the sounds that make up words in preparation for reading and writing. We provide dedicated singing and rhyme time every day, reinforced by our weekly specialist music lessons and assemblies.
- Begin our structured Monster Phonics teaching programme through a daily phonics and writing lesson.
- Write, discuss and tell stories in our role play areas and linked to our topics
Impact
Our children LOVE learning. Children make swift progress within a nurturing child centred context, and make a smooth transition to Key Stage 1. They flourish in their social, emotional and physical development, along with developing an excitement and love for learning and challenge. Our children talk and communicate in a wide range of situations, responding to adults and children, listening carefully and enjoying extending their communication skills. They enjoy words and texts and are beginning to decode and read for pleasure. They enjoy song and rhyme and are well prepared for early reading and writing. Finally, a LOVE of learning and curiosity is ignited leaving them eager to begin their next stage of learning.
