Early Years
welcome to Early Years
YOUR EARLY YEARS TEAM
Nursery Teacher and EYFS Lead: Mrs Wallace
Nursery Teaching Assistants: Mrs McHugh
Reception Teacher: Miss Bostock
Reception Teaching Assistant: Miss Taylor
Throughout the year we will update this web page with information relating to both the Nursery and Reception class curriculum along with useful links in relation to the exciting things that we have been learning.
Life in our EYFS unit is vibrant and fun! We offer children a wide variety of multi-sensory activities through indoor and outdoor learning experiences and opportunities, catering for individual learning styles. Our approach offers a balance between child-initiated play and adult led activities. We teach the children skills to enable them to be confident readers, writers and mathematicians as well as providing them with the opportunities to explore their own interests and ideas, developing skills that will support them in their future lifelong learning.
Our nurturing approach both through the classroom environment as well as from our experienced team of teachers and key workers, supports the well-being and emotional development of all children. Thus, ensuring every child feels happy, safe and confident, enabling interesting and purposeful learning to take place.
Curriculum: Our Curriculum is based around the understanding that children learn best through play and active learning. Our carefully tailored planning allows us to teach across all 7 areas of learning and development. These being:
- PSED-Personal Social and Emotional Development
- PD- Physical Development
- CLL- Communication and Language
- L- Literacy
- M-Mathematics
- UW-Understanding the world
- EAD- Expressive Arts and Design
Planning: Planning in the Early Years is unique. We have a long term plan which shows the ‘Loose themes’ we will be working on throughout the year. Our planning is always centred around a high quality text. However, it is important to note that we also follow the interests of the children. Often, the direction for our continuous provision planning can happen in the moment. We believe that children will become more absorbed in their leaning if they are excited and engaged by the content.
Our nursery class follow a two year cycle, as some children can be in our setting for up to 9 terms.
Our reception class follow a one year planning cycle. The EYFS curriculum is progressive in knowledge and skills to ensure that children leave our reception class prepared for the National Curriculum in Year 1.
Attached is the EYFS Statutory Guidance, which shows all 17 areas of leaning and the end of Early Years Foundation Stage expectations.
The EYFS Development Matters document is used as a guide to support planning and assessment.
Reading: Within Early Years and as a whole school we promote a love of books and seize every opportunity to share in the excitement, wonder and suspense of stories as well as the intrigue of discovering new facts that stem from initial interests and experiences. With this in mind, we encourage you to share regular reading opportunities with your child and make this time special. This could start with encouraging them to use the pictures to tell their own story, asking them what they think the book will be about based on the front cover and what they think might happen next, to referencing the characters and how they feel as well as other features of the book (front cover, author’s name, illustrator’s name) before beginning to explore words.
As a school we have adopted the scheme Read Write Inc. by Ruth Miskin, which is a structured, cumulative and evidence-based method of teaching reading. This consistency in approach across EYFS and KS1 ensures that there is a smooth transition from one class to the next. As we progress through this scheme with the children in both Nursery and Reception, we will upload useful links to this web page that you can access with your child at home and support them in each step of their learning.
Spare Clothes: Please provide spare clothes for your child in your Bruche draw string bag. These can be left in school, for use should your child have an accident or simply get wet/muddy within our outdoor provision. We will be spending lots of time enjoying the outdoor provision so we would also ask that you ensure your child has a suitable warm/waterproof coat to wear as well as providing a spare pair of wellington boots, if you have any and again these can be stored in school. Please ensure you label all of your children’s belongings.
We are very much looking forward to working with you and your child during their time in Early Years. If you ever have any questions or queries, please do not hesitate to ask.
Mrs Wallace and the Early Years Team