Early Years Foundation Stage

Between the ages of birth and five years (your child’s early years) is a very important stage in your child’s life, and their earliest experiences should be happy, active, exciting, fun and secure. The early years are a vital time when children’s brain development is rapid.

The Early Years Foundation Stage framework is about how children learn, as well as what they learn. Children need opportunities to learn and develop their own play and have educators who are experienced in providing the best possible care and education to children.

There are seven areas of learning and development. We support children to develop across the 7 areas of learning. However, our focus is to ensure children are secure in the Prime areas of learning. These areas are essential for your child’s healthy development and future learning.

• Personal, Social and Emotional development
• Communication and language
• Physical Development 
• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Expressive arts and design
• Understanding the World

Our experienced and creative team plan alongside the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum. Providing activities and experiences based on observations of children’s individual needs, interests and parental involvement.

Children are born ready, able and eager to learn. They actively reach out to interact with other people, and in the world around them. The four themes of the EYFS underpin all the guidance. These include: A Unique Child, Positive Relationships, Enabling Environments and Learning and Development. The Principles of the EYFS, Characteristics of Effective Learning together with the Prime and Specific areas of learning and development are all interconnected.

Each Key person is able to support the individual needs and all-round development of the children by building on your knowledge as a parent and home experiences. Together we can support your child’s development and learning through play.

Indoor and outdoor play is an important part of children's learning and development.  A rich and varied curriculum ensures children have access to exciting play and learning inside and outside.  The children have access every day to the outdoor spaces within the centre. They are free to flow inside and outside throughout the session and the team place a lot of emphasis on one learning environment between the indoors and outdoors. We are fortunate to have an outside covered area for those very wet days! However, the children are encouraged by the team to enjoy and play in all weathers including rain, snow, and sleet, hail and, of course, sunshine. We always ensure the children are appropriately dressed to ensure fun, excitement and learning. Physical play is very important as it encourages children’s co-ordination and control.

The use of the large physical play area in the Nursery garden gives the great opportunity for children to move around in a large space, use large physical movements and apparatus.

Story Curriculum

Each term a range of books are chosen which form our ‘termly focus stories’ – many of the activities and experiences which go on throughout the term are linked to the characters, themes and concepts which can be found within these books. Linking children’s learning to storytelling in this way provides many opportunities for children to become immersed in their play experiences, having built an understanding of the accompanying book.