Early Years

Early Years Lead: Miss Holly Hone

Intent

Our Early Years Curriculum aims to lay a secure foundation for future learning. All children deserve an education rich in awe and wonder with memorable experiences that allow children's natural creativity and curiosity to flourish.

The FS Team at Hill View Primary School nurture positive relationships and a positive environment, where the children feel secure yet are challenged to achieve their best.

In our Little Acorns Nursery, we recognise the importance of giving our children the best possible start to their education by planning and implementing teaching and learning opportunities that support them in reaching their full potential.

We know that our children enter the Nursery and Reception classes with varied life experiences and we aim to plan teaching and learning opportunities accordingly to meet their individual needs.

The Foundation Stage Early Learning Goals set out end of reception year expectations. We support the children to reach that goal in a way that works for them.

We strive to provide and improve,  a broadly enriched, rounded and stimulating learning environment where children can work with adults and peers in a climate of mutual respect to develop;

• Confidence in their ability to learn.
• The social skills necessary to learn.
• The emotional capabilities to enable them to understand their feelings and to solve problems.
• A unique child.

We aim to provide children, with a well-structured, safe, active learning environment both indoors and outdoors. This will enable them to develop the skills, attitudes and understanding that will form the basis of lifelong learning and encourage them to become useful, active members of a diverse and constantly changing society.

Inclusivity and Diversity

Diversity is simply difference. All human beings are different from each other in very many ways – our interests, physical abilities, qualities and appearance, ethnicity, life and work experience, gender, nationality, sexual orientation and the myriad experiences that have touched our lives or influenced our thinking.

Inclusion is an emotion. Feeling respected, valued, safe, trusted, having a sense of belonging and being able to be yourself and do your best work.

Diversity and Inclusion in our Early Years Unit

We collect 'All About Me' for every child who enters our Early Years Family. This document gives parents the opportunity to share their family religions and beliefs, information about their family tree and even occupations. This enables us to plan for our cohorts and to include their festivals and celebrations. We also like to evolve parents in educating us and the children.

We have a range of costumes and clothing which we rotate in our Role play area. These costumes and resources support us to celebrate events through the year such as; Chinese New Year, Ramadan and Eid. We do have dolls of different colours and textures also for children to access.

We talk about families and how we are all similar but also different making every person an individual. We encourage children to use mirrors for self portraits so that they can recognise their skin colour, eyes and hair. We encourage peer review, encouraging children to share what they like about each others work.

Key Overview Planning Documents

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End of Reception Early Learning Goals

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Implementation

Teaching and Learning at Hill View aims to develop our young people into confident and knowledgeable pupils who draw on their experiences, and those of others, to build a well-informed understanding of the world around them. It is underpinned by research into metacognition (the awareness or analysis of one's own learning or thinking processes).

• This all begins in Early Years and our journey with the children to become 'Year One Ready!'
• In line with the rest of the school we start each learning session with 'Brain Smart Start'
• This is what we do at the start of every session to get our brains ready to learn!

We unite as a class by moving to a favourite song. We de-stress by doing a breathing activity. We connect with one another by looking into each others eyes, giving a smile or a thumbs up. We then commit to a learning behaviour for the day.

Each half term, we introduce a new theme to provide inspiration for learning, whilst providing the flexibility for children to follow their own interests and ideas. Children learn through a  balance of child-initiated and adult-directed activities.  Our timetable is carefully structured so that children have directed teaching during the day. The timetable changes throughout the year to take into consideration the changing needs of the children.

These sessions are followed by small focused group work. This means the teacher can systematically check for understanding, identify and respond to misconceptions quickly and  provide real-time verbal feedback which results in a strong impact on the acquisition of new  learning.

Children are provided with plenty of time to engage in ‘exploration’ throughout the variety of  experiences carefully planned to engage and challenge them in the provision.

The curriculum is  planned for the inside and outside classrooms and equal importance is given to learning in both areas.

Impact

At Hill View, when you walk into our learning environment you will see:

• Enthusiastic children who are focussed on their play, exploration and learning
• Children asking questions
• Children making connections
• Children will be actively engaged in learning and their enjoyment of this learning will be apparent to all
• Focused and purposeful input from teachers, followed by carefully planned tasks to practice the taught skill
• Learning broken down into small steps with children demonstrating a high success rate in their outcomes
• Adults being proactive in their provision of scaffolds and reactive to constant assessment of children’s needs during the lesson

With the successful implementation of both an enriched, rounded and balanced curriculum and a well-structured, safe, active and challenging learning environment, both indoors and outdoors children will be able to develop the skills, knowledge and understanding that enables them to be successful learners.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

• Pupil discussions about their learning
• How the pupils use their learning environment
• Regular learning walks with leaders at all levels
• Moderation of a sample of pupils’ learning across the Early Years unit and with other settings.
• Target Tracker for measuring where the children are with regards to being 'on Track'

The impact of this is that Hill View Reception children:

• Children will more fully appreciate and understand the world around them, experiencing and learning about different cultures, music, dance, art and history.
• Children will actively ask questions about the world around them and their learning experiences and they will never fear making a mistake but instead see this as an opportunity to learn.
• Children will be able to make links with their learning develop their skills as they are able to use and apply skills learnt within their learning across the curriculum. This will ensure they are 'Ready for Year One.'