Early Years Vision at St Mary’s
At St Mary’s our aim is to offer every child a high-quality early year’s education in a supportive, safe and challenging environment in which they feel valued and are inspired to become life-long learners.
The Curriculum: What we want children to learn; Teaching in the EYFS is delivered in accordance with the government’s statutory document ’The Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage’. This document states that four guiding principles should shape practice in every early years setting. These are:
· Every child is a Unique Child, who is constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured. We are understanding their individual needs, fostering inclusion, and promoting mental health and well-being.
· Children learn to be strong and independent through Positive Relationships and benefit from a strong partnership between practitioners and parents/carers.
· Children learn and develop well in Enabling Environments and both indoor and outdoor spaces are supportive, stimulating, and tailored to the child's individual needs to encourage exploration.
· Learning and Development is at the heart of everything. Children develop and learn at different rates with teaching and support from adults, who respond to their individual interests and needs and help them build their learning over time.
The framework covers the education and care of all children in early years provision, including children with special educational needs and disabilities.
The curriculum is centred on 3 prime areas of learning:
- Communication and Language,
- Personal, Social and Emotional Development and
- Physical Development.
- Our curriculum also includes 4 specific areas which strengthen the prime areas:
- Literacy,
- Mathematics,
- Understanding the World and
- Expressive Arts and Design
These areas of Learning and Development address children’s physical, cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional development. No one aspect of development stands in isolation from the others as all Areas of Learning and Development are closely interlinked. This ensures the delivery of a holistic, child-centred curriculum, which
allows children to make links between their learning. All areas of Learning and Development are given equal weighting and value.
Our carefully designed Early Years curriculum provides a context to develop personal, social and emotional skills, communication and language skills, and physical skills, and apply and practice those skills, particularly in reading and oracy.
We recognise that many of our children may have limited access to outdoor spaces therefore we offer lots of learning outdoors to build children’s confidence and physical strength and co-ordination through our outdoor continuous provision. We promote speaking and listening skills by providing a language rich environment, which gives opportunities for children to experience new and imaginative vocabulary through problem solving, book sharing, role-play, child initiated activities and when using the outdoor area.