The Early Years Foundation Stage at Park Spring Primary School is the start of our school’s ‘Golden Thread’. Our aim is for our children to be happy, confident, caring and resilient individuals.
To achieve this aim, we plan for children within Nursery and Reception to experience a broad range of high quality, meaningful interactions and activities that spark their interest and curiosity. This engages them in their learning and allows them to develop positive learning behaviours, or ‘characteristics of effective learning’. These characteristics are playing and exploring, active learning & creating and thinking critically. We also know that successful learning within the early years should be meaningful to children, so that they can use what they have learned and apply it in new situations.
The adults working within Nursery and Reception ensure children can flourish within a safe, secure environment. We believe it is vital to build positive relationships with children, as well as establishing clear routines and expectations, so that children achieve well and enjoy school. We are our children’s biggest advocates and support them to develop their self-regulation skills through explicit teaching of the ‘Zones of Regulation’. The zones are reinforced through everyday interactions with children.
Our Early Years Curriculum encompasses learning opportunities throughout the day. These include high quality continuous provision and child-initiated learning, adult-led and planned activities, interactions, visits and visitors. The adults sensitively support the children to progress their learning by providing vocabulary, modelling and appropriate levels of challenge.
The curriculum is planned in a sequential way and provides opportunities to revisit skills and knowledge so that children can use and apply what they have learnt in different ways.
Knowing the children well is vital, so that we can build on their needs and interests – our curriculum is not limited to what is written down and must be flexible.
Engaging parents in their child’s learning is very important to us, because we know that effective home-school partnerships play a vital role in helping children to achieve their full potential.
Our aim is that our Nursery children will enter Reception with secure foundations within the prime areas of Communication & Language; Personal, Social and Emotional Development; and Physical Development. This will ensure that every child has the necessary skills to embrace new and varied challenges in Reception.
We want our children to leave Reception with solid foundations in reading, writing and mathematics, to enable them to access the National Curriculum in Year 1 and beyond.
November 8, 2024