Intent
To create a safe and nurturing environment where every child feels valued and heard. To guide children in their first steps towards a life-long love of learning, with high expectations for all. To develop children’s natural curiosity, allowing them to follow their passions and experience new challenges. By establishing positive relationships and promoting independence, our youngest children can take risks and achieve the amazing. Through clear boundaries and routines, children will build confidence and resilience. By balancing structured learning with purposeful play, children will be fluent readers, proficient writers, problem solvers and leaders of their own destiny.
Implementation
Teaching & learning based on Children’s interests:
Practitioners involve children regularly in their learning experiences. Children vote daily for the story book they would like to read. Our curriculum and practitioners are flexible taking account of children’s interests, questions and prior knowledge.
A regular cycle of learning
We use children’s interests planning to broaden and deepen them building on their knowledge. Practitioners use play partnering to support and build on children’s interests in the moment. In the moment support is used to move children on in their learning, by working towards/on next steps.
Aspects of our curriculum are sequenced to provide robust progression of skills such as Essential Letters & Sounds for phonics teaching and NCETM Mastery programme for maths. These are organised in our Subject Sequences table on page 3.
Core experiences: growing vegetables, looking after animals, cooking & learning in nature.
We provide experiences that meet the needs and strengths of our children and the communities they come from. We provide plenty of opportunities for outdoor play and learning. Our children come from a wide variety of backgrounds including working families and families with limited outdoor space. We have resourced provision for children who have physical and medical needs.
We provide children the experience of quality texts and value story time as an opportunity for children to enjoy these texts. We use core texts, Talk for Writing and ‘5 a day literacy’ opportunities to support this.
