EYFS - EARLY YEARS FOUNDATION STAGE CURRICULUM
The school follows the early years foundation curriculum with its focus on learning through play and direct teaching of key skills alongside the DRET EYFS taught curriculum. The curriculum focuses on games and activities, investigations and directed tasks across the seven Educational programmes.
Learning takes place both inside and outside, so children need to wear suitable clothing for the weather.
The seven key features of effective practice
We believe strongly in the Seven Features of Effective Practice (Developmental Matters 2021)
- The best for every child
- High-quality care
- The curriculum: what we want children to learn
- Pedagogy: helping children to learn
- Assessment: checking what children have learnt
- Self-regulation and executive function
- Partnership with parents
The characteristics of effective teaching and learning
At Bobby Moore Academy in planning and guiding what children learn, staff reflect on the different rates at which children are developing and adjust their practice appropriately.
The three characteristics of effective teaching and learning are:
- playing and exploring – children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’
- active learning – children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements
- creating and thinking critically – children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things
At Bobby Moore Academy each child is treated as unique during their learning journey. We encourage them to be resilient, capable, confident and self- assured. The EYFS environment facilitates the development of positive relationships with adults and children and it also enables children to become resilient, confident and independent learners. Thus, developing important lifelong skills. We also welcome and encourage positive relationships with parents and careers in our friendly nurturing setting.
Children have access to resources from the seven areas of learning and they are actively encouraged to self-select the activities they would like to undertake. This enthuses and motivates the children to explore and investigate but also enables them to develop skills of independence, negotiation and problem solving. Children are also taught and encouraged to demonstrate respect and responsibility for their environment, and this involves taking care of equipment and resources both indoors and outdoors.
‘Key Worker’ System
Every child in a class is allocated a ‘Key worker’, who will develop a special relationship with that child and will monitor their learning & development.
The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum consists of 7 educational programmes that are divided into three prime areas and 4 specific areas of learning.
Prime areas include:
Personal, Social & Emotional Development
Children’s personal, social and emotional development (PSED) is crucial for children to lead healthy and happy lives and is fundamental to their cognitive development. Underpinning their personal development are the important attachments that shape their social world. Strong, warm and supportive 9 relationships with adults enable children to learn how to understand their own feelings and those of others.
Children should be supported to manage emotions, develop a positive sense of self, set themselves simple goals, have confidence in their own abilities, to persist and wait for what they want and direct attention as necessary. Through adult modelling and guidance, they will learn how to look after their bodies, including healthy eating, and manage personal needs independently. Through supported interaction with other children, they learn how to make good friendships, co-operate and resolve conflicts peaceably. These attributes will provide a secure platform from which children can achieve at school and in later life.
Communication & Language
The development of children’s spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development. Children’s back-and-forth interactions from an early age form the foundations for language and cognitive development. The number and quality of the conversations they have with adults and peers throughout the day in a language-rich environment is crucial. By commenting on what children are interested in or doing and echoing back what they say with new vocabulary added, practitioners will build children's language effectively.
Reading frequently to children, and engaging them actively in stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems, and then providing them with extensive opportunities to use and embed new words in a range of contexts, will give children the opportunity to thrive.
Through conversation, storytelling and role play, where children share their ideas with support and modelling from their teacher, and sensitive questioning that invites them to elaborate, children become comfortable using a rich range of vocabulary and language structures.
Physical Development
Physical activity is vital in children’s all-round development, enabling them to pursue happy, healthy and active lives. Gross and fine motor experiences develop incrementally throughout early childhood, starting with sensory explorations and the development of a child’s strength, co-ordination and positional awareness through tummy time, crawling and play movement with both objects and adults. By creating games and providing opportunities for play both indoors and outdoors, adults can support children to develop their core strength, stability, balance, spatial awareness, co-ordination and agility.
Gross motor skills provide the foundation for developing healthy bodies and social and emotional well-being.
Fine motor control and precision helps with hand-eye co-ordination, which is later linked to early literacy.
Repeated and varied opportunities to explore and play with small world activities, puzzles, arts and crafts and the practice of using small tools, with feedback and support from adults, allow children to develop proficiency, control and confidence. (DM 2021)
The specific areas are:
Literacy
It is crucial for children to develop a life-long love of reading. Reading consists of two dimensions: language comprehension and word reading.
Language comprehension (necessary for both reading and writing) starts from birth. It only develops when adults talk with children about the world around them and the books (stories and non-fiction) they read with them, and enjoy rhymes, poems and songs together.
Skilled word reading, taught later, involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words.
Writing involves transcription (spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech, before writing).
Mathematics
Developing a strong grounding in number is essential so that all children develop the necessary building blocks to excel mathematically.
Children should be able to count confidently, develop a deep understanding of the numbers to 10, the relationships between them and the patterns within those numbers. By providing frequent and varied opportunities to build and apply this understanding - such as using manipulatives, including small pebbles and tens frames for organising counting - children will develop a secure base of knowledge and vocabulary from which mastery of mathematics is built.
In addition, it is important that the curriculum includes rich opportunities for children to develop their spatial reasoning skills across all areas of mathematics including shape, space and measures.
It is important that children develop positive attitudes and interests in mathematics, look for patterns and relationships, spot connections, ‘have a go’, talk to adults and peers about what they notice and not be afraid to make mistakes.
Understanding the world
Understanding the world involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community.
The frequency and range of children’s personal experiences increases their knowledge and sense of the world around them – from visiting parks, libraries and museums to meeting important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters.
In addition, listening to a broad selection of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems will foster their understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world. As well as building important knowledge, this extends their familiarity with words that support understanding across domains. Enriching and widening children’s vocabulary will support later reading comprehension.
Expressive Arts and Design
The development of children’s artistic and cultural awareness supports their imagination and creativity.
It is important that children have regular opportunities to engage with the arts, enabling them to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials.
The quality and variety of what children see, hear and participate in is crucial for developing their understanding, self-expression, vocabulary and ability to communicate through the arts.
The frequency, repetition and depth of their experiences are fundamental to their progress in interpreting and appreciating what they hear, respond to and observe.
Phonics
At BMA we use Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc Phonics programme. It is used with Reception and KS1 children who are learning to read and write, and for lower KS2 students who need to catch up.
It is a complete literacy programme taught for 45 to an hour each day in Reception and an hour a day in Year 1 and above. It has proven to develop:
- fluent, enthusiastic readers
- a deeper comprehension of texts
- confident speakers
- keen writers
Throughout the programme, children are taught to:
- learn to read and write letter-sound correspondences quickly
- decode effortlessly, spell and handwrite easily
- comprehend what they read
- read with fluency and expression
- write confidently using oral rehearsal
- work effectively with a partner to articulate their learning at every step
Early Learning Goals
The early learning goals (ELGs) define the level of development children should be expected to have attained by the end of EYFS. The ELGs support teachers to make a holistic, best-fit judgement about a child’s development, and their readiness for year 1.
