Our Curriculum

Our vision:
Our philosophy is to value every child as a unique individual, who enjoys learning and thinking for themselves. Our aim is to provide a happy, safe, and stimulating environment, which allows children to feel safe, secure, and valued. Where every child can flourish, learn at their own pace and in their own way.

Our aims are achieved by following the statutory Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), which give us the framework, through the seven areas of learning. These areas of learning encourage their development and enjoyment of learning through a range of different activities, both adultsled, and child initiated.

We believe that the relationships children develop in early years, with each other and our staff, are fundamental in helping them build the best foundation for them to become confident independent lifelong learners.


Our Curriculum:
Our curriculum covers all the early years foundation stage (EYFS), the development of children’s spoken language underpins all the seven areas of learning and development. We have a large focus on communication and language throughout our setting.

The prime areas of learning build a strong foundation for children to learn which enables them to flourish in the specific areas of learning.

Prime areas of learning:

  • Communication and language (CL)

Adult interaction with the children is very important to us, as we believe children benefit from being with a responsive and enthusiastic adult who show interest in taking to them. Back and forth interaction helps forma good foundation for language and cognitive (think, reasoning and remembering) development. We also encourage the children to interact with each other and express their wants, needs and feelings throughout play.

We support language in several ways, using words, facial expressions, actions, songs, body language, repeat back, non-verbal, or visual cues. If children find words different to say we encourage them to clap the syllables, for example ‘e-le-phant’ this can really help the child learn how to say words. We believe it’s very important to give the children time to respond and add new words to help extend their language. Which helps build confidence and become more in dependent learners.

We also follow the ‘Listening for Sounds Programme’ with all the children. The aim of the programme is to help children listen to the sounds which make up speech. They then learn to identify differences between the sounds, these are the building blocks which help the children to learn how to use the speech sounds themselves. The programme is very flexible,and we adapt it to the children individual needs. We aim to do the listening for sounds programme throughout the day, with a lot of repetition and practice. This is done one to one or small groups, some children like to be asked to do it and other will go and get the pack and ask to do it.

Other activities include stories, rhymes, singing, action songs, small world, music, role play, puppets, snack/lunch time etc.

  • Physical development (PD)

Physical activities are fundamental for children’s all-round development, enabling them to pursue happy, healthy, and active lives. As well as good physical development, we talk about good food we can eat to promote healthy lives.

We provide arange of activities which helps develop the children’s fine, gross motor skill, co-ordination, and core strength.

We have an exciting outdoor area, where the children can climb, run, jump off steps, kick balls, ride bikes, balance on createsobstacle courses and many more. Gross motor skills activities are achieved outside a lot of the time; however, we do have dancing, exercise, balancing beams inside for the children.

We (staff and children) all sit at the table for meals times, where the staff encourage good table manners and communicate with the children about different topics. This is a lovely time for the staff ad children to communicate with each other too.

Personal hygiene before mealtimes and during toileting is promoted with all the children and we talk about why we do this with them.

We encourage independence during toileting (adult close by) and hand washing. This is to help with school readiness.

Fine motor skills activities, mark making, scissor skills, Lego bricks, play dough, getting dressing, using folk and spoon, personal hygiene, puzzles, train tracks, threading, tongs, craft and many more.

  • Personal, social, and emotional development (PSED)

The children’s PSED is an important part of learning how to live a happy and healthy life and is fundamental to their cognitive development. This includes supporting the children with their emotions, sense of self, confidence, managing personal needs, independence, make good friendships, co-operate, and peacefully resolve conflict.

We encourage the children ‘to have a go’ through the day and help when needed, making sure we prise any achieves the children make. This helps with independence and sense of self and confidence to ask for help when needed.

When the children are playing and a conflict arises, we allow time for the children to resolve it themselves (adult close by watching), if an adult need to intervene we talk about sharing, feelings and how we could resolve it. This is all done with the children’s age and development stage in mind.

We have clear boundaries for the children, this is important to keep them safe and well. Children learn best when they are healthy, safe, and secure. Through having clear boundaries and managing behaviour makes for a good learning environment.

We have a toothbrush song we sing at preschool to promote good oral hygiene; alongside this we have a crocodile with big teeth and a tooth brush so we can practice brushing teeth and talk about why it is important to have good oral hygiene. Alongside a healthy diet.


Specific areas of learning:

  • Literacy (L)

We read stories to the children throughout the day, this is normally done in small groups due to the age range of the children. A small group of children and an adult can go into the den and read a book together, we ask/talk about the story (all age appropriate for the group).

We had a focus books per half term, this book is based around the planning when possible. This helps the children learn to repeat words and phrases from the stories. Help understand the print has meaning, how we read left to right and top to bottom.

We have a song, poem’s and rhymes bag/book in the reading corner, these helps encourage the children who are non-verbal yet to ask to sing or choose a song they would like to sing. Action songs are great for children to gain more confident, so these are very popular.

Large and small muscle co-ordination activities are done, for example large brush painting, mark making in wet sand, mark making with pencils, writing names in the air with our fingers, etc.

See CL about clapping syllables.

  • Mathematics (M)

We promote a positive attitude towards mathematics by using maths language throughout each session. All maths language is adapted to each child in order to challenge them encouraging the ‘have a go’ attitudes. Maths language includes numbers, comparing amounts (lots, more, same, bigger, smaller, high, low, tall, heavy etc), patterns (polka dots, stripes etc), spatial words (in, on, under, up, down, beside, between etc), locations (in front of’ and behind), shapes etc.

Throughout the room we have jigsaw, number games, counting blocks etc for the children to access.

  • Understanding the world (UW)

Understanding the world around them is encouraged throughout the setting by a number of activities and expanding on what the children say, see or read about.

Range of our activities are……

  • Treasure basket - explore the different textures
  • The garden den - herb garden, Bughouse, mud kitchen etc.
  • Pets- caring for living things, life cycles etc
  • Water play - pouring, floating, sinking.
  • Clothing game - summer/ winter clothes.
  • Cooking- ingredient’s (where there come from), cooling, heating, melting etc.
  • Explore- how thing work, shadows (shine light through materials)
  • Occupations - talk about a range of occupations, role play,
  • Difference/similarities between people - looks, skin colour, hair types, cultural.
  • The world - countries, holidays.

 

  • Expressive, arts, and design (EAD)

We encourage the children to express themselves through imagination and creativity, this helps develop a child’s brain and allows them to be creative in their own unique way.

A wide range of media and material are available for the children to explore express themselves through art. We also have a range of open-ended materials for the children to choose how to use:

  • Mark making
  • Paints and brushes (experimenting with colour)
  • Different texture (card, paper, colour, shapes)
  • Junk modelling
  • Roleplay
  • Small world
  • Space for movement, dance and music
  • Instruments
  • Glue
  • Collage

We consider each child’s needs and development when we plan our working towards (next step), Intent- our aim to help children learn and develop, Implementation- ‘how’ we are going to do it, Impact- how effective implementation was (what have the children learnt

We use this information to help creative a fun learning environment for the children to development in.

Our overall goal is to help each child be ‘school ready’, school is a BIG step for the children and families. Our goal is to ensure the children have strong social skills, can cope emotionally, are relatively independent in their own personal care and have a desire to learn about the world.


Pedagogy (The methods and practice of teaching):

Our curriculum follows the EYFS which consist of 7 areas of learning. We teach children by planning engaging, playful opportunities across both the prime and specific areas of learning.These is achieved by carrying outthe 3 I’s Intent, Implementation and Impact.

  • Intent - our aim to help children learn and develop
  • Implementation - ‘how’ we are going to do it
  • Impact - how effective implementation was (what have the children learnt)


All the areas of learning are inter-connected; however the prime areas are particularly important for children to build a solid foundation for learning. The development of children’s spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development. We recognise that all children develop and learn at different rates and our curriculum is designed to be flexibly to meet all the children individual needs.

We support individual learning through observations, which we then build upon to develop next steps for them, while ensuring we provide meaningful opportunities for the characteristics of effective teaching and learning (playing and learning, active learning and creating and thinking critically).

Our setting provides a continuous provision, which means ‘to continue the provision for learning in the absence of an adult’. We do this with the children needs, interest and development progress.

Learning opportunities are planned around the children’s interests, with staff providing creative ways to expand the children knowledge to achieve the highest standard possible.

As well as our indoor provision our outdoor provision provides an exciting experience for the children to explore risky play, natural world, creative play, imagination etc


Assessment:

Each child has their own key worker who will form a secure attachment with them and over sees their development. However, we are a small team, all working with the children therefore we all form a good bond, understanding each other’s children’s stages of development .


Tapestry:

We use Tapestry as our ongoing assessment tracker, we record our children’s knowledge, skills, achievements, and learning characteristics on the online learning journal platform. We link the children’s assessments/observation to the EYFS 2021 developments matters, using a flag marker to build an accurate understanding of each child’s development across all the areas of learning. At regular interval key workers will reflect on the children’s development on Tapestry, also looking at the development matters checkpoints.

Development Matters Guidance 2021: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1007446/6.7534_DfE_Development_Matters_Report_and_illustrations_web__2_.pdf

Each half term/term staff will come together to look at each children profiles and discussion any concerns or areas which we would like to review. This is monitored at other times if we feel it’s necessary. If concerns are raised during this time, parents are informed and any relevant professionals.

Tapestry is shared withparents so there are kept up to date with progress and development of their child while at preschool. Parent can also add home achieve to Tapestry. As well as Tapestry we also speak to all the parent daily about how their child’s day has been and what we have been doing. Ensuring information is shared.

It’s always the small pieces that make a BIG picture