EYFS

Hawksworth Wood Primary School Early Years Foundation Stage

Our Intent

At Hawksworth Wood we believe that children’s early learning experiences deeply affect their future physical, cognitive, emotional and social development. We understand that building secure relationships with children and their families at the early stage is key to understanding how we can maximise learning opportunities for each and every child in our setting. We are fully committed to taking the time to understand and follow children’s interests and provide a rich curriculum that supports learning, consolidates and deepens knowledge and ensures that children achieve their next steps.

Both our indoor and outdoor provision is carefully planned and demonstrates a thorough knowledge and understanding of the way in which our children learn. We aim to prepare our children to achieve the Early Learning Goals at the end of Reception and ensure that all children have made good or better progress from their individual starting points.
Our ultimate goal is to prepare our children with the knowledge and skills needed for the next stage of their learning journey in KS1. This is so important as we know that what our children learn in these vital first years of life will stay with them forever and that optimising children’s early education is the best investment we can make in ensuring their future success.

Implementation
As a team we follow the EYFS curriculum and ensure that the learning opportunities and experiences we provide are clearly linked to both the Prime and Specific areas of learning.
Prime
• Personal, Social and Emotional Development,
• Communication and Language
• Physical Development
Specific
• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the World

We begin each year by looking at the individual needs of our children and their different starting points and with this information in mind, we are then able to plan a range of broad and balanced learning experiences.

We place huge importance on the development of children’s vocabulary and ensure that staff are skilled in assessing early speech and language development and have the expertise to support children in being able to communicate their thoughts and ideas and explore the meaning of new words.

Staff use their knowledge of the Characteristics of Effective Learning to ensure that they plan appropriate activities and organise their provision in a way that demonstrates a clear understanding of the way in which our children are motivated to learn. We know that all children are unique, with their own individual fascinations and it is for this reason that we believe a balance of child and teacher led activities is crucial in order for our children to become fully engaged and excited by their learning.

We feel that effective provision both indoors and out is based on a clear understanding of what we want our children to learn and how we plan to achieve this. We want our children to be independent in accessing quality play-based experiences that encourage them to notice, question and wonder.

We use a combination of online learning journals and work in books to celebrate children’s achievements, record observations, assess and track children’s progress and to identify their next steps.

Effective interactions between staff and children and regular home/school communication ensures that our curriculum planning and provision is flexible and continuously adapted to meet the needs of all learners. Regular parent’s meetings, stay and play sessions and workshops ensure that parents are kept up to date with their children’s development and progress and are fully aware of how they can continue to support their children’s learning outside of school.