Intent: Our Early Years Vision
Welcome to Early Years Foundation Stage. Here at Roberttown we aim to provide the highest quality care and education for all our children, thereby giving them a strong foundation for their future learning. We create a safe, secure and happy environment with motivating and enjoyable learning experiences, that enable children to become confident and independent learners. As a church school we value the unique child and work alongside parents/carers and others to meet their individual needs and help every child to reach their full potential.
Positive relationships are the key to unlocking children’s potential and providing care, nurture and a safe environment are fundamental in our role as practitioners in the early years.
We provide exciting and challenging learning opportunities, in an enabling environment, based on the principles of the EYFS. Our aim is to develop confident and independent learners, who are resilient in the face of a challenge.
We aim to provide them with the skills they need to be school ready and working alongside parents to create a strong partnership in fostering children’s learning and development.
Implementation: Our Approach
We have planned an exciting and challenging curriculum based on our observation of children’s needs, interests, and stages of development. This spans across the seven areas of learning, to enable them to achieve the early learning goals by the end of their reception year. Children learn through a mix of both child initiated and adult led activities, based indoors and out. Parents are informed of intended learning through our Knowledge Organisers, which are sent out at the beginning of each half term.
The transition process is designed to help children settle quickly by getting to know them at their previous settings, meeting with families individually and spending time with them in our environment. We place a high priority on establishing positive relationships quickly, to enable children to settle in and begin their learning journey.
Baseline assessments, carried out in the first few weeks of children starting with us, inform teaching and learning and allow us to understand children’s individual needs.
Children have whole class and small group teaching times throughout the school day, which increase in length as they progress through the EYFS. The curriculum is delivered using a play-based approach as outlined by the EYFS. Practitioners work to develop children’s interests, responding to each child’s emerging needs and guiding their development through warm, positive interactions, coupled with secure routines for play and learning.
We plan a balance between children having time and space to engage in their own child-initiated activities and those that are planned by the adults. During children’s play, early years practitioners interact to stretch and challenge children further. We believe that ‘back and forth’ interactions form the foundations for language and cognitive development and so these are crucial in underpinning all areas of learning. Practitioners build language effectively by commenting on children’s play, echoing back with additional vocabulary, reading stories, rhymes, poems, non-fiction texts and providing lots of opportunities to use and embed new words. In planning and guiding children's activities, we look at the different ways that children learn and reflect these in our practice. We also use knowledge from our assessments to plan to close gaps in children’s learning.
We recognise the great importance of early reading with our phonics teaching starting promptly in the first term, keeping parents informed at our Reading Meeting and daily communication through our reading records. We also use Instagram to update parents on our weekly learning in class.
As part of our daily practice we observe and assess children’s development and learning to inform our future plans. We record our observations in a variety of ways. Everyone is encouraged to contribute and discussions take place. Observations of children’s achievements are collated in their own literacy and maths books, as well as class floor books. In the Autumn and Spring term, parents/carers are invited to attend a parents/carers evening and a detailed annual report is written at the end of the year.
We foster a strong partnership with parents through transition meetings, reading meeting, stay and play, showcases of our learning, instagram and floorbooks.
Further Information
Please see below for further information or click on the link to our Early Years Long term plan. https://www.roberttownschool.co.uk/long-term-planning/
Long Term Plan Vocabulary