Our Curriculum

Curriculum

We provide a range of interesting and engaging activities and experiences for the children to explore that incorporate all seven areas of the EYFS Curriculum. During each session, the children are offered experiences that support their development, right across the Early Years curriculum from social, physical and communication skills to being creative and understanding the world around them.

We draw upon ideas from the Montessori and Curiosity approach to enable us to support every child to reach their full potential. We believe that children’s imaginations can be restricted by many toys, dressing up and plastic resources. Our aim is to make our settings a more natural, holistic and calming environment. We aim to provide open ended resources to enable the children to use their wonderful imaginations, follow their own interests and we will enhance the different areas to provide rich, stimulating and engaging experiences.

Above and beyond this we listen to and observe each unique child. From here we generate learning opportunities that match their individual needs.

We value the relationships we form with each child and their parents. In support of this we assign a key practitioner to each child who will form a day to day bond. They work with each child’s interests whilst supporting them in taking risks and exploring. The practitioner will keep records of the child’s development and communicate with parents.

The curriculum of learning experiences is shaped into three prime areas and four specific areas, more details of which are outlined below:

Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Communication and language
Physical Development

Literacy
Mathematics
Understanding the world
Expressive Arts and Design

None of these aspects of the curriculum are offered in isolation but in context and tailored to meet each child’s individual needs and interests.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

Here we support the children in making relationships, developing self-confidence and self-awareness, and their ability to manage their behaviour.

We encourage kindness, respect, being helpful and developing empathy.

We enable children to develop conversational language and build those important first friendships.

Communication
and language

This is about learning to listen attentively, being able to understand instructions and answer how and why questions about their experiences. Also to express themselves effectively, being aware of the listeners’ needs.

We provide a language rich environment and encourage the children to use the new vocabulary they have learnt.

We provide narrative in play to support our younger children, those with emerging needs or those with English as a second language.

Physical Development

The children have opportunities to learn control of their large and small movements, from climbing and running safely amongst other children, to cutting paper with scissors or threading beads.

They also learn about keeping healthy and safe and about their own basic hygiene.

We provide a range of activities in our inside and outside areas for the children to develop a love of moving their bodies and developing skills.

Expressive Arts and Design

This is about exploring texture, colour, materials design, form and function as well as songs, music, dance, role play and stories. Throughout the preschool activities, any expression of imagination is embraced and encouraged.

In our creative areas, children can self-select from a range of creative resources such as paint, glue, collage materials, junk modelling, pencils, crayons and natural resources.

We focus on the process and skills, rather than a final piece of work. Children are able to develop skills in drawing, painting and exploring colour.

Literacy

The children are exposed to a wide variety of stories, songs and rhymes. We love to get lost in stories together, developing our imagination and creating our own characters and story lines. Stories are rich with new vocabulary and themes for us to explore.

We aim to have a variety of books, fiction and non-fiction, for the children to discover throughout the settings. Teaching children how to use books to find out information, for example when exploring bugs in the garden, enables the children to understand the different ways we can use books.

We work with your child to enable them to understand that written symbols carry meaning, we explore different symbols around the setting. We encourage the children to write for purpose as a part of their play and activities. Every mark or scribble can mean so much to an emergent writer!

We celebrate all mark making and love to hear the meanings behind every brush stroke. As your child’s fine motor skills develop, the scribbles, lines and shapes will start to turn into recognisable letters, normally starting with their own name.

Mathematics

We incorporate mathematical language throughout each and every session. For example, ‘Can you jump 3 times to warm up? Now more. Let’s try 5 times.’ Or ‘Who has two feet for these two shoes?’ Or ‘We would all like to share the cake. Help me count how many pieces I need to cut.’

The children are encouraged to find ways of noting what they’ve counted and in the context of their play. They share out toys with a friend, count how many steps there are to climb and create patterns using beads or peg boards.

We use measurements when cooking, pouring and scooping and enjoy measuring ourselves. We love to sort resources by type, colour and size.

Maths is everywhere and our practitioners use these opportunities to develop the mathematical skills spontaneously, ensuring it always has relevance and has been drawn from the children’s ideas and interests.

Understanding the world

We give the children experiences to connect them with ideas about communities, the jobs that people do and significant events in their lives. Also with their immediate environment, living things, growth and decay. In our outside areas, we go bug hunting and the children enjoy making ‘nests’ from all the cut grass, twigs and leaves.

We plant vegetables, herbs and flowers so we can learn how to care for living things and see how they grow. We enjoy using the herbs in our playdough and mud kitchen recipes and using the vegetables to make soup or within our imaginary play.

And finally, we are routinely inspected by OFSTED to ensure we meet their standards for learning, development and care for children up to the age of five. During our latest Ofsted inspection we were rated GOOD.