Our EYFS specialist is Mrs Griffiths (BA Early Years Leadership and Education)

Read more about the EYFS curriculum here:

EYFS Curriculum Intent: To encourage independent, inquisitive and happy learners. We recognise that children have a thirst for new experiences and knowledge, and should be provided with opportunities to engage their inquisitive minds.  The guiding principles that shape our practice in the Early Years are that children are born ready, able and eager to learn.

The EYFS Curriculum: Our Vision

In the EYFS, we aim for every child to be:

• Happy, secure and to feel safe
• Independent, self-assured risk takers
• Confident and Resilient
• Excited and Motivated to learn
• Socially strong and able to form positive relationships

Our staff deeply care about the children in our school.  We treat all children as individuals and promote positive relationships.  We endeavour to form close relationships with families and the wider community to promote the best outcomes for all children. Staff members use consistent boundaries and praise and rewards form the backbone of our behaviour management system.

We recognise and value individual’s strengths and talents and believe in praising effort and valuing the little steps that really make a difference to a child’s progress.  We know that by doing this, we are building happy and secure children, who feel safe. Praise and clear boundaries contribute to the confidence and resilience of our children.

Creating children who are independent, not only in their organisational skills but also in their learning, is a high priority for us.  We believe that all children are intrinsically capable of amazing things and we develop this through having high expectations of all children.  We pose challenges, build confidence and self-esteem, show children how capable they are and support them to reach their potential.  We take time to teach independence skills explicitly and support children to develop into well-rounded, ambitious learners.  Taking risks is an important part of learning and we have developed both our environments and our teaching and learning strategies to promote children measuring and assessing risks for themselves and in having confidence and resilience to attempt challenges.

Confidence and resilience are key skills for a developing learner.  We explicitly teach children to understand the learning process and understand mistakes are valuable learning experiences.  Through the Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning, we develop children’s active learning skills and help them to understand and respond to feedback.  Perseverance is highly valued and praised.  We strongly believe that in order to develop resilience, we must teach children to be independent learners who problem-solve for themselves and know to keep trying and how and when to access help.

Excitement and motivation for learning are developed through planning fun, engaging and challenging activities based on the needs of the children.  We follow the fascinations and interests of the children and teaching and learning is fast paced to respond to the changing needs of individuals.  We provide new and interesting experiences, building on and adding to the range of activities children will have had at home or through pre-school experience.  We make learning purposeful and rooted in real-life contexts, where possible, so that children have motivating reasons to learn and to help them to apply their knowledge to a range of situations.

Our class value is ‘Friendship’ and we base lots of our PSED activities around this value, alongside empathy and understanding for others to enable children to become well-rounded individuals.