Early Years Foundation Stage

Welcome to our Early Years.

At Crossways we have two Reception Classes; Badgers and Rabbits. Our indoors classroom is one large space, where the children learn across the provision. Our children have the freedom to move around the classroom spaces as they learn. Our wonderful outside space is our third classroom, and a natural extension of the indoor setting. Our outdoors provides an opportunity for our children to develop their ideas on a larger scale and explore the natural world. 

Our Ethos

The start of our children’s journeys at our school is so important. Children develop quickly in the Early Years and our highly skilled practitioners aim to do all they can to ensure that our children have the best possible start to their education. Development is not an automatic process; it depends on each unique child having opportunities to interact in positive relationships and enabling environments. We believe in the power of play and getting to know each child as an individual. We see our children as resilient, capable, confident and self-assured. Our staff team work alongside your child to develop these skills to enable them to become lifelong learners.

Building positive relationships with our families is a crucial part of our ethos. We want to get to know our children and families as quickly as we can. We offer ‘Stay and Play’ sessions to provide our children and their families with an opportunity to familiarise themselves with our environment and our team before they start in Reception. We also offer welcome meeting and individual parent meetings before the children start. It is enormously beneficial for children to meet with our team and build relationships before their first day. This is hugely successful in creating positive relationships with our children and their families; and it supports our children in feeling as comfortable as possible on their first day at Crossways.

We know that by working closely with our families, each child’s development and education is enhanced. We encourage our families to get involved in as many ways as possible: sharing their skills and interests, helping us with trips, becoming parent volunteers and more.

To further strengthen home-school links, we know that children love to share their interests and ideas from home. We build on these opportunities to develop our children’s learning. Our families contribute to their children’s online learning journals via Tapestry and our children love sharing photos and videos from their home at school.

Characteristics of Effective Learning

These characteristics underpin our children’s learning and development and support them in becoming and remaining effective and motivated learners. We strive to ensure that our children will be lifelong learners by creating exciting and purposeful opportunities for them to play and explore, learn actively and create and think critically.

Playing and exploring: engagement

1. - Finding out and exploring
2. - Playing with what they know
3. - Being willing to ‘have a go’

Active learning: motivation

• - Being involved and concentrating
• - Keeping trying
• - Enjoying achieving what they set out to do

 Creating and thinking critically: thinking

• - Having their own ideas
• - Making links
• - Choosing ways to do things

If you have any questions please either talk to us on the playground or email: eyfs@crossways.org.uk