Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
Every child deserves the best possible start in life and the support that enables them to fulfil their potential. Children develop quickly in the early years and a child’s experiences between birth and age five have a major impact on their future life chances. A secure, safe and happy childhood is important in its own right. Good parenting and high quality early learning together provide the foundation children need to make the most of their abilities and talents as they grow up.
Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage March 2021
The EYFS is based upon four principles:
- Every child is a unique child, who is constantly learning and who can be resilient, capable, confident and self assured.
- Children learn to be strong and independent through positive relationships.
- Children learn well in enabling environments with teaching and support from adults, who respond to their individual interests and needs and helps them to build their learning over time.
- The importance of learning and development. Children develop and learn at different rates,
At Hullavington CofE Primary and Nursery School, all teaching staff deliver the EYFS through high quality teaching alongside an enriched learning environment. Our philosophy is to nurture every child’s enthusiasm for learning, developing both skills and confidence as they take their first steps on their own unique journey of lifelong learning.
Curriculum
We aim to provide a Curriculum that is ambitious and responsive to individual childrens starting points, developmental needs amd interests, through our curriculum we aim to:
- Make the child’s first experience of school happy, positive, and fun
- Provide a rich, interesting, and stimulating learning and teaching environment that allows children to fully develop their skills and attributes during their independent play.
- Foster a love of learning and develop enquiring minds.
- Promote emotional well-being.
- Build positive relationships and work in partnership with families.
- Support children’s development in all areas of the EYFS -
- Support every child as an individual
Communication and Language
In the Early Years at Hullavington Cof E Primary and Nursery School we foster and make the most of children's instinctive need and desire to communicate by:
- Role modelling the qualities and characteristics of an excellent communicator
- Immersing children in a rich environment of words, sounds, rhythm, verbal and non-verbal expression
- Engaing children in conversation through-out the day
- Providing genuine reasons, provocations and a real purpose to listen and talk
- Valuing the different ways and means children use to communicate
Personal, Social and Emotional
In the Early Years classes at Hullavington CofE Primary and Nursery School we create a supportive and nurturing atmosphere and ethos which provides our children with a sense of safety, security, belonging and self worth. We do this by:
- Establishing and developing mutually respectful relationships with and between adults and children.
- Understanding children’s idiosyncrasies, qualities, and attributes so they feel values and develop positive attitudes towards themselves and others.
- Knowing and understanding our children’s family contexts and dynamics.
- Setting rules, establishing boundaries, following routines and explaining consequences.
- Modelling and explaining behaviours and emotions and how to manage and resolve conflict.
- Empowering children to be independent enabling them to make informed choices and decisions.
- Using praise to build confidence.
Physical Development
At Hullavington we nurture children’s strong need and desire to be physically active which builds the foundations for other areas of their development by:
- Building children’s strength, stamina, balance, co-ordination and dexterity
- Developing a range of large and small movements which they can control
- Improving and refining children’s control and manipulation of a variety of tools
- Instilling a sense of confidence in children’s own physical abilities enabling them to negotiate spaces
- Promoting independence by teaching them to make decisions and choices that will keep them healthy and safe
Literacy
In Early Years at Hullavington we develop enthusiastic, emerging readers who take delight in listening to stories, enjoy reading for pleasure and know how to use text to find out information by:
- Modelling the pleasure and joy that books provide
- Fostering a love of books by sharing, talking about and taking part in activities linked to texts
- Immersing children in sounds, words, rhythm, rhyme and song
- Teaching early knowledge and skills of reading
- Demonstrating that text has meaning
- Showing the characteristics of a fluent reader
We develop enthusiastic emerging writers who have an enduring and positive attitude to writing who by the end of Reception can form letters and words and who can draw from a rich store of language and imaginative ideas by:
- Ensuring writing tools and materials are readily available and valuing the differing ways that children make marks
- Teaching the physical skills and which will enable them to control and manipulate writing tools
- Providing the children with genuine reasons to mark-make/write and modelling the pleasure and purpose of writing
- Immersing the children in an environment of print e.g. vocabulary, sentences, books and labels
- Developing children’s vocabulary by rehearsing orally what they are going to write
Mathematics
At Hullavington we foster a ‘have a go’ attitude towards Mathematics to support our children in developing a positive attitude towards Mathematics. We develop fluent mathematitions who have a deep understanding of number. We ensure that they are able to provide explanations, give reasons for their answers and tackle future challenges by:
- Providing opportunities for children to practise, rehearse and apply mathematical knowledge and skills
- Encouraging children to investigate numbers by exploring their characteristics and patterns, understanding how they can be manipulated using different operations
- Encourage them to think logically so that they can make connections and solve problems
- Fostering children’s acquisition and use of mathematical vocabulary to justify and exaplain their ideas
Understanding The World
Intent Overview
In Early Years at Hullavington we help children to understand where they and other significant people and events sit in time. We capitalise on the children’s fascination and interest in their surroundings and the world in which they live, supporting their instinctive desire to know, understand and find out more. We do this by:
- Capitalising on children’s natural desire to make sense of their own place in history
- Exploring the lives of people who are familiar to them comparing similarities and differences
- Encouraging children’s curiosity about people and events both within and beyond living memory
- Exploring historical information and artefacts to ask questions and draw conclusions
- Encouraging an appreciation of the natural world and recognising the similarities and differences
- Fostering a sense of awe and wonder about the world in which they live
- Developing an appreciation of other people, their communities and their traditions
- Encouraging the children's sense of responsibility for the care of their own environment and the natural world
- Providing freedom for the children to explore, investigate and experiment using the five senses
- Encouraging children’s curiosity about how and why things work and how things change
- Encouraging questioning, testing out of ideas and drawing conclusions
- Fostering children’s excitement and pleasure in the awe and wonder of natural phenomena
Expressive Art and Design
In the Early Years at Hullavington Cof E Primary and Nursery School we capatalise on children’s natural excitement for and freedom to express their thoughts, ideas and inner feelings by:
- Providing children with the opportunity to explore and experiment with different media and materials
- Encouraging children to be inventive and imaginative allowing them to express their creativity in ways that are personal to them
- Providing children with a purpose to design, make and evaluate functional products
- Encourage children to investigate and explore a wide range of materials and tools
- Supporting children to find original solutions using resources in unique ways
- Nurturing children’s confidence to try new things
- Providing freedom for children to be curious, experimenting with and creating their own music
- Reinforcing children’s responses to sounds and encouraging composition and performance
- Providing freedom for children to be expressive, experimenting with and creating their own series of movements