EYFS

“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’

Matthew 19:14

Our Aims

Across the Early Years, our aim is to provide a kind, caring and happy environment where children feel safe and confident to explore and learn. We aim to instil the Characteristics of Effective Learning to develop resilient, capable confident and self-assured children. We recognise that the children are unique and welcome and celebrate differences within the Early Years, therefore making all learning child-centred.

We provide a broad and balanced Early Years Curriculum that;

Provides quality interactions, to ensure the development of language and communication.
strives to ensure that children acquire a wide vocabulary and communicate effectively.
Has a key focus on development to early reading and phonics.
Encompasses ‘in the moment planning’ opportunities and carefully planned adult activities
Provides a high quality learning environment that encourages child-initiated play and ensures the best developmental opportunities for early years children building on what they know and can do.
In reception, there are half termly themes to engage and explore based on the children’s interests.

Activities within our classroom are planned to ensure full and active participation of all children, whatever their ability, ensuring individual potential is met.

Teaching and Learning

We are guided by Development Matters, written for Early Years settings by the Department for Education. This offers guidance for how children develop and how Early Years practitioners can support this.

Across the early years, we observe what the children are doing, assess the children’s play and interactions and sensitively identify potential gaps in their knowledge which provides opportunities for further learning and challenges their thinking.

The adult enhances learning opportunities through communicating and modelling language, explaining, demonstrating or exploring ideas, encouraging, praising, questioning, recalling, challenging or providing a narrative for the child’s play. All children learn and develop in different ways and our curriculum ensures that individual learning needs are met.

As we take our lead from the children’s interests, they are highly motivated to learn, which results in high levels of wellbeing and involvement, a deeper level of learning and growing into the best that they can be.

We deliver daily short meditation time and prayer, which provides the opportunity to reflect and recognise that we are part of God’s loving family and thank him for all that he brings us.

We build positive and work in partnership with families (recognising that parents are their child’s first and foremost educator), carers and professionals to support every child to develop and learn.

Nursery

Across our nursery we follow an 'in the moment learning' ethos. We believe this places children at the centre of all their learning rather than practitioners deciding what children will be learning ahead of time. We allocate a keyworker to each child which helps us to have good knowledge of each individual, build good relationships with both the child and parent/carers, so they feel secure and confident in our Nursery.

Each child is on their own personal and unique learning journey and so it does not matter if they start with us in the September, January or April.

Outcomes

Across the Early Years children develop knowledge and skills across the 7 areas of learning with the majority of children reaching a good level of development.
Children will have experienced a curriculum that provides exciting and enriching learning experiences.
Children develop the skills to become independent, resilient leaners who are ready for the next stage in education.
Children develop a love of learning and have a positive attitude to learning and are proud of what they have accomplished.
Good relationships are established with parents and the school community
Practise is improved year on year.
Children develop a love of reading, rhymes and songs, and by the end of reception, use their knowledge of phonics to read accurately.