Welcome to Early Years

What is the Early Years Foundation Stage?

Welcome to the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), which is how the Government and early years professionals describe the time in your child’s life between birth and age 5. This is a very important stage as it helps your child get ‘school ready’, as well as preparing them for their future learning and successes. From when your child is born up until the age of 5, we strongly believe that their early years’ experience should be happy, active, exciting, fun and secure; whilst supporting their development, care and learning needs. For children to acquire a deep level of learning, it is important to ensure they have opportunities to build memory prompts, enabling them recall things which they have learnt, effectively continuing to build their knowledge as they progress throughout their education.

What is the EYFS Framework – why do we have one?

Firstly, the framework sets out:

• The legal welfare requirements which we follow to keep your child safe and promote their welfare.
• The 7 areas of learning and development which define examples of your child’s play and activities as they learn new skills and knowledge.
• Each area of learning is broken down into small steps, called ‘Development Matters Statements’, we use these along with our own professional judgement, to assess the progress your child is making.
• Early Learning Goals are expected levels which your child should reach, usually by the end of their reception year. It is important to remember that every child is an individual and will progress at different rates, some may exceed this goal, some may reach it, whilst some will still be working towards it into Year One.

How my child will be learning?

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Framework explains how and what your child will be learning to support their healthy development. They will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge and demonstrating their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development.

There are three prime areas of learning which are:

• Communication and language
• Physical development
• Personal, social and emotional development

These prime areas are those most essential for your child’s healthy development and future learning.

As children grow, these prime areas of learning help them to develop skills in four specific areas. These are:

• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the world
• Expressive arts and design

As Early Years teachers, we use these 7 areas to plan your child’s learning and activities.  We fully understand that each child is an individual, and will develop at their own pace. Consequently, we ensure we are supporting them to make sure that their activities are both suited and tailored to meet your child’s unique needs. We strongly believe that children in their early years learn by playing and exploring, being active; developing creative and critical thinking which takes place both indoors and outside.

EYFS Statutory Framework

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/974907/EYFS_framework_-_March_2021.pdf

Development Matters

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

PHONICS

From September 2021 we have been using the government validated systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) called ‘Little Wandle: Letters & Sounds Revised’. The programme is designed to teach children to read from Reception to Year 2, using the skill of decoding and blending sounds together to form words. The Little Wandle programme provides a full progression through all commonly occurring GPCs* (sounds), working from simple to more complex, and taking into account the frequency of their occurrence in the most commonly encountered words.

The teaching of Phonics is fast-paced, and we encourage all children to actively participate in each lesson, and by encouraging the children to take ownership of their learning we are continuously striving for excellence.

FOUNDATIONS FOR PHONICS IN PRE SCHOOL AND NURSERY

 We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘Communication and language’ and ‘Literacy’. These include:

• sharing high-quality stories and poems
• learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes
• activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending
• attention to high-quality language.

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We ensure Nursery are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception.