Curriculum incl Assessment
The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Learning and Curriculum
Children learn best through play; it is their approach to understanding and making sense of themselves, their relationships with others and the wider world. Through play, our children explore, investigate, experiment and build on experience.
Purposeful play provides our children with the opportunity to practise skills and solve problems, both independently and collaboratively. We carefully plan and provide motivating, real-life opportunities for our children to act out real and imaginary roles or situations and so to grow to understanding the world in which they live.
The Early Years curriculum is divided into three Prime Areas of learning and development and four Specific Areas. The Prime Areas are fundamental, work together and go on to support learning and development in the Specific Areas. The Specific Areas include essential skills and knowledge for children to participate successfully in society.
Prime Areas of the EYFS Curriculum
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
In the Prime Areas, the children learn to:
- Share, take turns and develop respect for each other.
- Make friends and become confident independent learners.
- Behave appropriately when playing with others.
- Listen to others and understand spoken language to enable children to follow instructions correctly.
- Learn new words rapidly, use them in conversations and develop their own narratives and explanations.
- Join in conversations with adults and children.
- Develop control of their bodies using both large scale movements such as running and jumping and small-scale movements such as holding pencils and using scissors.
Specific Areas of the EYFS curriculum.
-
- Recognise phonemes (letter sounds) and Graphemes (letter shapes).
- Enjoy sharing books and stories with adults and friends.
- Begin to read simple sentences using phonic knowledge to decode regular words.
- Draw, make marks, write letters, words and simple sentences.
- Count accurately groups of objects and recognise numerals.
- Add, subtract and problem solve during practical activities.
- Use everyday language to talk about size, weight, capacity, distance, time, money and shape.
- Look closely at how things work, why things happen, living things and the natural world.
- Purposefully engage and create with a wide range of media and materials to express their ideas and understanding of the world.
All of the learning opportunities in Reception are carefully planned to ensure that they meet our children’s needs and next steps in learning and development. Our highly skilled Early Years team observe the children whilst they are engaged in play, noting their interests and development. In this way, the team are able to extend and challenge our children through motivating and purposeful play. Our skilled practitioners also introduce new skills and provocations to the children to broaden their knowledge and understanding of the world and the curriculum. Our staff team work alongside our children to develop and embed skills, such as reading, writing and maths.
EYFS Curriculum
