EYFS Curriculum Overview

    Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum Statement

“Early years is a crucial stage for children's development …”

Julian Grenier

Starting in the Foundation Stage, Crow Orchard Primary School have eight key priorities that underpin every subject area. We believe that by focusing on these key priorities our children will be ready to successfully meet the challenges of the next stage of their education and their lives.

Intent 

At Crow Orchard Primary School we provide a secure learning environment where children are valued and where every child’s unique learning potential is developed. We advocate a fun and curiosity through purposefully planned interactions that support making links to everyday situations and the wider world around them.  

• Safeguard and always promote children’s welfare
• Recognise children as competent individuals and provide opportunities to support their learning.
• Meet next steps by developing skills and consolidating learning.
• Work with parents and other adults who are important to the child to help them achieve their full potential.
• Gain good knowledge and understanding of individual needs.
• Plan and provide experiences which are appropriate to each child’s stage of development, as they progress towards the Early Learning Goals (ELG’s)
• Ensure children make good progress throughout the academic year.
• Organise an indoor and outdoor environment that allows children to explore and learn securely and safely.
• Support a fluid transition into KS1

Implementation

In Nursery and Reception, we recognise that children develop at their own pace. We carefully plan to meet individual needs so all our children grow to be confident and independent learners.  As a unit we value the children’s interests and ensure that learning is active and involves first hand experiences using cross-curricular topics that are set in meaningful contexts.

To support this learning and development is divided into 7 areas;

Personal, Social and Emotional Development; Physical Development; Communication and Language Development; Literacy Development; Mathematics; Understanding of the World; Expressive Arts and Design.

There is a balance of child and adult initiated activities with focused teaching and independent learning.

Purposeful play situations are planned to support the mastery of skills and are valuable for making formative observations.

Open ended questioning is used to encourage investigation and problem solving.

Children are involved in making choices and independent decisions. Respect for themselves and others is strongly encouraged.  

We pride ourselves on effective communication not only between the staff and children but interactions with parents / carers ensuring that our curriculum planning and provision is flexible and continuously adapted to meet the needs of all learners.

Each child has their own learning journey which is an open record of their learning and development and e-learning profiles have been set up for each child on Seesaw to make observations of their independent learning.

Seesaw is an excellent communication tool that enables parents to keep up to date with their child’s achievements, development and progression as well as giving parents an opportunity to contribute to their learning journey by sending additional photographs and videos.

We use Target Tracker to assess the children termly. This data follows the children throughout their time here at Crow Orchard from pre-school up to year 6.  

Achievement of these Prime and Specific areas of learning is supported by the Characteristics of Effective Learning.

These are: Playing and Exploring; Engagement, Active Learning; Motivation, Creating and Thinking Critically.

 Impact 

We measure the impact of our framework through monitoring the progress of our children throughout the school year. We recognise that every child is an individual and every child has their own route to learning and through the delivery of our programme we ensure that children make good levels of progression. We acknowledge children develop and build on what they already know, incorporating and interconnecting all the areas of Learning and Development and it is important that they are involved in their own assessment.

We collectively assess through the 8 values to ensure the children are ready for the next phase of development.

Kindness - looking after our classroom and everyone / everything in it.

Curiosity – exploring through play, investigating the environment, and listening to each other’s ideas.

Creativity – children enjoy the process of thinking and develop their own creative response to learning.

Courage – developing confidence when accepting a challenge and finding different ways to achieve the outcome.  

Proud – taking pride in acquiring new skills and demonstrating these across all areas of development.

Honesty – children understand the importance of being trustworthy and demonstrate this at school and at home.

Aspire – developing independence by reflecting on mistakes and knowing how to overcome them in the future.

Resilience – the ability to deal with the here and now.

We plan daily interactions and gain a good level knowledge for each individual child. In support of this we use assessments via systematic observations and necessary interventions to support learning.

We use Target Tracker to help generate reports and identify gaps in learning. We plan and provide experiences which are appropriate to each child’s stage of development, as they progress towards the ELG’s and ensure rates of progress are good for all children, including those with Special Educational Need’s (SEND), English as an Additional Language (EAL) or children who are vulnerable.

The Early Years Foundation Stage Leader is:   

Mrs Laura White                                                 

The Early Years Foundation Stage learning facilitator:

Mrs Emma Fitzsimons

All members of staff are Paediatric First Aid trained.

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