Through our ‘DRIVE for Excellence’, we inspire and motivate all children to have a wonderful desire to learn and grow as individuals and as a collective. This vision is tailored to empower and support them to become motivated, life-long learners who are prepared to take risks, learn with growing independence and develop key skills to become successful within their educational journey and beyond.
The early years of learning are such a crucial and special time for young children and we believe that a strong start in the EYFS is essential in ensuring the strong foundations are in place for children to thrive. We have a high focus on developing excellent social skills, encouraging children to share and cooperate effectively whilst also instilling in them a strong sense of self-control and respect for others.
We want our children to be confident and consistently striving to do their best, even when faced with challenges. By interweaving our core values with fundamental British values, we cultivate an inclusive community where every child feels valued.
The Early Years Curriculum is organised into three prime areas and four specific areas of learning. The prime areas of learning are the foundations that need to be explicitly modelled, with repeated opportunities for the children to rehearse, so that they are able to transfer the knowledge and skills across to the specific areas of learning.
We have used these areas of learning to construct an inspiring and ambitious curriculum, incorporating diverse learning opportunities. Our curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced to meet the needs of children, by progressively building upon what they know and can do. This approach enables them to have the key knowledge and skills required for future learning. We believe that this supports our children in knowing, remembering, and achieving more, whilst providing them with the cultural capital to succeed in life.
Our rigorous approach to phonics (Little Wandle), mathematics (Mastering Number) and early reading support children to master the essentials skills required to be successful, confident and fluent learners. We also prioritise the use of quality texts to build new knowledge and vocabulary and to enhance the learning experience.
Personal development is a key part of our curriculum offer, to ensure that our children gain the essential skills they need to live a healthy and happy life, have emotional security, a strong moral compass and to know what makes a good role model. Our reception children love to go on a Commando Joe mission and explore their emotions using the colour monster!
We facilitate opportunities for each child to grow and thrive through rich, firsthand experiences and irresistible learning.
Our curriculum provides awe and wonder, where children are encouraged to investigate and be curious about the world around them, with further exceptional experiences which enable children to celebrate diversity and culture.
Within our reception area, we have created a stimulating and supportive learning environment, with resources that are carefully chosen to meet the children’s needs and promote learning.
We provide an enabling and nurturing learning environment, with a high focus on positive relationships and high quality, genuine interactions, for children to feel valued and celebrated as individuals, whilst being safe and cared for. We encourage children to develop transferable skills and executive functioning strategies through a diverse and nurturing approach, supporting them to build relationships, recognise their emotions, think flexibly and empower them to fly high.
During each day the children will explore high quality, continuous and enhanced provision with a focus on specific knowledge and skills. This is delivered in a play-based approach, as we believe that hands on learning provides opportunities to develop, embed and retrieve key knowledge and skills. Irresistible learning opportunities abound, stimulating curiosity and a genuine enthusiasm for exploration. We empower our children to take risks in their learning, fostering confidence and independence, thereby ensuring they flourish as individuals ready to embrace the future.
The children access the classroom, indoor and outdoor areas across the school day to widen their play experiences through challenge and intentional interactions, with adults focused on providing the language for children to become effective communicators. Indoor and outdoor play is vital to the development of strong foundational skills, and adults skillfully plan in opportunities for children to explore, solve problems and extend their knowledge and understanding through both experiences in the classroom and beyond.
Over the year, we create a range of high quality role play and small world provisions which are regularly enhanced, allowing the children to extend and demonstrate their knowledge and skills through a play based approach. These provision areas include explorers, space stations, Percy’s Hut, fairy tale lands and more.
In Reception, children are taught through a personalised approach that is chosen to best meet the diverse needs of the cohort. Central to our pedagogy is a high focus on the characteristics of effective learning, which are embedded within our practice.
The characteristics of effective learning are:
We use ‘irresistible learning opportunities’ and planned experiences for children to engage in challenge as they play and learn, to stimulate curiosity and a genuine enthusiasm for exploration. This empowers our children to take risks in their learning, fostering confidence and independence, key skills that lay strong foundations for their educational journey into Year 1 and beyond.
Our teachers are highly skilled at ensuring that learning inputs are clear and explicit and support the children to develop a deep understanding of the new knowledge or skill being introduced. Through an experience rich curriculum, we ensure that our children access a range of practical experiences which bring the learning to life and provide cultural capital. In addition to this, we have carefully chosen research-informed strategies to ensure that teaching and learning is of the highest quality, and enables our children to be deeply engaged and highly motivated within their learning.
The main strategies that we utilise are:
We pride ourselves on ensuring that all children are appropriately challenged and supported throughout their time in school.
Staff are knowledgeable in quickly spotting and addressing misconceptions and adapting learning, through strategies such as questioning, scaffolds and modelled thinking, so that ALL children are able to achieve. We prioritise early identification of any additional needs our children may have, ensuring the appropriate advice and support is accessed and put into place.
By working closely with outside agencies and specialists, we are able to provide tailored interventions that enable all of our children to thrive.
We spend time playing with the children in provision, expertly getting to the know them including their existing knowledge and understanding, language comprehension and use and their interests. This enables our staff to quickly recognise those that will potentially need early intervention, due to joining the school with a lower starting point.
Our staff are highly skilled and confident within all aspects of the EYFS curriculum and assessment points. Throughout the year, the team will rigorously monitor who is and who is not on track, through high quality interactions, continuous and regular observations and assessments. Then adaptations are made and additional support is put into place to enable the children to get back on track and make progress. This approach results in a high proportion of our pupils reaching the expected level of development by the end of the year.
Each child has their own online Tapestry journal, in which we share experiences that the children have taken part in, so that families are able to share their school experience with their child. We also create learning profiles, which hold the children’s recorded learning across the 7 areas of the Reception framework. These books, filled with high quality learning outcomes, demonstrate the progress that each child has made through their reception year at school, particularly within mark making, EAD, writing and number.
Reception also complete the Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) within the first 6 weeks of starting school. The RBA is a short assessment process, with interactive and practical activities using a range of simple resources and pictures. The assessment focuses on the areas of communication and language, early literacy and mathematics skills to baseline the knowledge and skills that your child has when beginning school. This is a statutory process for all schools, as of September 2021.
We value the role parents and carers play in their child’s education and are committed to working together. We encourage open lines of communication, through our open-door policy to ensure that parents and carers are well informed and actively involved. In addition to our open door policy and use of Tapestry, learning workshops and pop-ins are held termly, to enable parents and carers to come into school and see the wonderful learning that the children are involved in.
Throughout our curriculum, we have embedded exceptional experiences for children to learn from first hand experiences, giving them a love of learning and to continue developing their cultural capital. We plan in exceptional experiences that we know our children will love, including bread and toast making, melting ice, large mark making experiences, seasonal play, opportunities to build and test their creations and activations such as a giant beanstalk appearing in the classroom!
Opportunities beyond our usual provision include:
Children can learn first hand about the world around them, from creating bird feeders and looking out for birds to going on minibeast hunts, creating natural mark making resources and exploring mud. We strive to provide a curriculum that fully utilises our outdoor spaces beyond the classroom.
Our children have access to a set of balance bikes, to take on balance bikeability through the autumn term. We set out a programme where children develop balance and coordination skills, think about safety on bikes all through an active approach in which they can transfer their skills to our range of bikes, scooters and vehicles.
We have a high focus on protected story telling time, with high quality books to develop a strong love for reading. Through having visits from our reading buddies, retelling stories in interactive ways, practicing choral and echo reading, reading beyond the classroom in areas such as the library and outdoor reading areas, making a choice between two books daily and interweaving books into our wider provision, we build children’s curiosity and enthusiasm towards books and reading. This, coupled with our commitment to high quality reading areas, allows children to become great storytellers, authors, illustrators, explorers and much more when they dive into the world of books!
Within the Reception year, children have the opportunity to go on a bus as a cohort, to visit a farm. This exceptional experience not only provides them with a highly engaging opportunity linked to their knowledge and understanding of the world learning, but it also equips them with transferable skills, such as independence, instruction following and confidence to go beyond the school, enhancing their cultural capital experience.
Throughout the year we have a range of visitors within Reception, to continue developing awe and wander of the world around us. Visitors include a music specialist, focusing on tapping out a beat on Djembe drums, a language specialist who visits to teach us some French key words and songs and our own grounds keeper, who works incredibly hard, just like Percy the Park Keeper!
Our diverse curriculum enables us to plan exceptional experiences to celebrate diversity and cultures in our school and allows us to explore culture in the wider world. Our celebrations include:
