EYFS
Accountable: Miss Becky Spry
Responsible: Miss Butterfield, Mr Dominic Cook and Miss Rachel Allen
Curriculum Intent
At Grove Primary School, our philosophy is to value every child as a unique individual, who enjoys learning and thinking for themself. Our aim within the Early Years Foundation Stage is to provide a happy, safe and stimulating environment, which allows all children to feel secure and valued and therefore ready and eager to learn. We provide a supportive and secure environment in which every child can flourish and learn at their own pace and in their own individual way. Our role is to stimulate and encourage their development and enjoyment of learning through a variety of different activities, both adult directed and child initiated in secure indoor and outdoor situations.
We believe the relationships which the children develop in the Early Years, with each other and with our staff, are central to their happiness and will lay the best possible foundation for them to become independent lifelong learners.
Curriculum Implementation
Children in our Early Years phase follow the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum, which consists of seven areas of learning. We teach children by ensuring challenging, playful opportunities across both the prime and specific areas of learning. We recognise that all children develop and learn at different rates and so our EYFS curriculum is designed flexibly to meet the needs of all individuals. We support individual learning through our skilful interactions and observations which lead to detailed next step planning.
Curriculum Impact
The Characteristics of Effective Learning underpin our curriculum and pupils learning, through an enabling and well-planned environment we ensure we provide meaningful opportunities for playing and learning, active learning and creating and thinking critically. As children utilise and develop these characteristics they become effective and motivated learners who demonstrate high levels of well-being and involvement.
Learning Environment
At Grove, child-initiated learning is at the heart of our practise and is embedded in every aspect of our learning environment. We believe children learn best through active engagement with the world around them and through meaningful and relevant experiences supported by responsive adults.
Therefore, we recognise that the environment plays a key role in supporting and extending children's learning and use continuous provision to support this. Skilful adults observe children's play and plan around children's interests and smart steps, enriching the provision as well as adding enhancements to continuous provision in response. We believe self-initiated learning and exploration are key ingredients to having independent children who are motivated to learn.
We use Tapestry as our assessment tracker, to record our children’s knowledge, skills and learning dispositions. It is a consistent and reliable way of demonstrating progress through the EYFS.
The statements within Tapestry correlate with Development Matters and the new Birth to 5 Matters that reflect an ‘age related expectation’. Tapestry recognises the importance and values the 'how' of learning and so the characteristics of effective learning and levels of well-being and involvement are recorded too.
Through daily observation and interaction we are able to build a rich and accurate understanding of each child across all aspects of learning and development.
Our assessments are meaningful and impact on our children’s learning and development as we use them to inform our children’s next steps which are personalised and challenging. Our observations then inform the assessments we make on Tapestry as children approach the end of each range milestone. We bring our knowledge of a child together to make a summative assessment about where they are in relation to key developmental milestones.
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