Giffard Park Primary School

Welcome to  Giffard Park EYFS

Intent

At Giffard Park we place great value on the development of children as individuals and providing them with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to prepare them for the challenges in Key Stage One and beyond. Our aim in the EYFS is to build strong foundations rooted in academic success as well as moral and spiritual development, so that ultimately our pupils can be successful, go on to be active citizens of society and happy, curious life-long learners. 

Our curriculum is therefore the cultural capital we know our pupils need so that they can gain the knowledge, skills and understanding they require for success.

 We teach pupils how to listen and speak effectively and meet the high expectations for behaviour by working together and being kind. As such, we prioritise personal, social and emotional development and communication and language.   Our enabling environment and warm, skilful adult interactions support the children as they begin to link learning to their play and exploration. As the pupils move into Reception, we invest time and energy into helping pupils set and reflect on their own goals by aiming high and developing a love of reading, writing and number.  This is delivered through an ambitious holistic curriculum which maximises opportunities for meaningful cross-curricular links and learning experiences as well as promoting the unique child by offering extended periods of play and sustained thinking, following children’s interests and ideas.  We value imagination and creativity and seek to create a sense of enjoyment and fascination in learning through an enabling continuous indoor and outdoor provision, alongside visits, visitors and regular forest school sessions. Our investment in specialist teachers for P.E. and forest school mean that children continually receive high quality teaching in these areas. 

 Implementation

Our curriculum follows the ‘Early Years Statutory Framework for the Early years Foundation Stage’. This document specifies the requirements for learning and development in the EYFS and provides the prime and specific areas of learning we must cover in our curriculum. It also provides the characteristics of effective learning providing the underlying skills children need to learn.We provide a curriculum based on good quality, structured and child-initiated play experiences both inside and outside. Resources are presented to give children an invitation into learning to develop their own interests and curiosity, enabling all children to make sense of their world and realise their full potential. These invitations to learning activities encourage children to practice and build upon ideas, and to learn to self-regulate and understand the need for rules.

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum.  Children follow the rigorous and highly successful Read, Write Inc program faithfully and use reading scheme books precisely matched to phonics teaching.  Children meet good outcomes for reading with the vast majority of all children passing the Year One phonics screening. Explicit planned vocabulary teaching across the curriculum helps to close the vocabulary gap. High quality texts are read daily that ensure a high level of vocabulary experience and acquisition across the full curriculum. 

We follow the White Rose Maths and Teaching for Mastery approach in Reception with an emphasis on studying key skills of number, calculation and shape so that pupils develop deep understanding and the acquisition of mathematical language.  Pupils learn through games and tasks using concrete manipulatives which are then rehearsed and applied to their own learning during exploration. Pre-school pupils begin to develop these key skills during daily maths sessions where they explore sorting, quantities, shape, number and counting awareness.  These early mathematical experiences are carefully designed to help pupils remember the content they have been taught and to support them with integrating their new knowledge across the breadth of their experiences and into larger concepts. 

Our inclusive approach means that all children learn together, but we have a range of additional interventions and support to enhance and scaffold for children’s learning who may not be reaching their potential as well as to move on children who are achieving well.

 Staff give clear messages to children about why it is important to eat drink, rest, exercise and be kind to each other. They teach children to take managed risks and challenges as they play and learn, support them to be active and develop physically. Children have opportunities to think creatively and develop their imagination and a sense of curiosity. They communicate with others as they investigate and solve problems. We believe it is crucial that all young children are given plentiful opportunities to choose their own activity, to explore and experiment and above all, to enjoy learning.

Our Foundation stage comprises of Pre-school (Smart Steps,3-4year olds) and Reception (4-5 year olds) Children in Pre-school start the term after they turn 3 and we have an Autumn, Spring and Summer intake. Offering full and part-time spaces. Reception’s entry point is the September, in the year children turn 5. Reception children are fulltime following their initial transition time. Through careful planning, assessment, and moderation we work to ensure that children make progress from Pre-school into Reception. Planning considers previous skills and knowledge and builds on this through topics across both years. Basic phonics, maths, writing, reading and vocabulary skills are planned carefully and give children the basis they need to continue into Key Stage One. 

Staff provide information for parents about their children’s progress in line with the requirements of the EYFS. We provide information to parents about how to support your child’s learning at home, including detail about the school’s method of teaching reading and phonics, and how to support your child to read.

We tailor our staff CPD to be early years specific and are focused on moderating outcomes across EYFS so that every member of our team feels confident in making accurate judgements about where individual pupils are and their next steps for learning. 

Areas of learning

The EYFS is made up of seven areas of learning:

Prime areas

 · Personal, Social and Emotional Development

· Physical Development

· Communication & Language

 Specific areas

· Literacy

· Mathematics

· Understanding the World

· Expressive Arts and Design

These areas are delivered throughout our curriculum and are linked closely together. They are equally important and depend on each other. All areas are delivered through a balance of adult led and child-initiated activities.

The EYFS classes have their own outdoor area used all year round in all weathers. Being outdoors encourages learning in different ways. It offers the children more opportunities to be creative and explore on a larger scale as well as to be physically active linking the indoors and outdoors together. Children will have opportunity to experience all seven areas of learning whether they decide to learn indoors or outdoors.

Impact 

Our curriculum needs to meet the needs of our children, including our disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND. We spend time looking at and evaluating how children are learning.  This is achieved through talking to children, looking at their work, observing their learning experiences and analysing data and progress by year group, class, groups and individuals. Every member of staff uses ongoing observational assessment to identify children’s starting points. We use this information to plan learning experiences and next steps so that knowledge and skills are built cumulatively and ensure progress.  During each assessment window, three times a year, teachers update the progress children have made onto Target Tracker which allows us to assess the impact of teaching and evaluate whether it has been enough.  

Our curriculum and its delivery ensure that all children make at least good progress. During their time in our EYFS, children need to make rapid progress so that we meet the national expectation for GLD at the end of the year.  We believe high standards are due to the enriched play-based exploration alongside the rigour of assessment and teaching the children well as they move through the early years – a rich diet of balanced learning experiences is undoubtedly the best way to develop happy, curious children. 

The impact of the EYFS curriculum is reflected in having well rounded, happy, and confident children with a well-developed level of skills and knowledge transitioning into Key Stage 1 with a love for learning. We follow the statutory requirements as set out in the EYFS profile.

We aim for children to achieve the Early Learning Goals  by the end of their Reception Year and have achieved a Good Level of Development (GLD)

We aim to offer a Foundation Stage that:

-builds on our children’s prior knowledge and experiences in all areas of learning.

-builds children’s vocabulary and sees children using new vocabulary in their play and conversations.

-provides a rich and stimulating environment, both indoors and out; allowing children to develop curiosity, find their own interests, be imaginative, take risks and challenge their thinking.

-ensures that all children are given opportunities to be successful within a supportive, caring environment that fosters a feeling of self-worth and confidence.

-Supports children to use their knowledge of phonics to read accurately and with increasing speed and fluency.

-promotes positive relationships between children, practitioners, parents, and the wider community.

We measure progress and children’s learning across the year through formative and summative assessment which are based on the teacher’s knowledge of the child, their learning journeys, photographs, and videos recorded on Tapestry. We observe in a variety of ways to ensure we get a ‘well-rounded’ picture of each child’s learning. We also have observation check points that are tracked every term.