Early Years Foundation Stage
At Kew Woods our early years prepares our children for the learning journey ahead of them in later years. We are delighted that the quality of our provision has been recognised with the accreditation of our Early Years Quality Mark. Our aspiration for the children who attend Kew Woods is that they become self-motivated learners, with the necessary skills and attitude to achieve the best possible outcomes.
We achieve this through the delivery of a high quality curriculum which is defined by the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework. Through planned, purposeful play, children are able to discover, practise and refine their skills in literacy and mathematics as well as find out about themselves and their environment. In a broad and balanced way, our provision ensures coverage of the seven areas of learning and responds to the needs and interests of all our children. We consider the characteristics of effective learning at all times, which promote learning through play and exploring – to deepen each child’s investigative skills for them to experience things and have a go; active learning – to promote resilience and attitude to learning; creating and thinking critically – to provide opportunities for each child to develop their own ideas, make links between their ideas and develop strategies for doing things. The characteristics of effective learning underpins the opportunity for each child to develop a positive attitude to learning, an enthusiasm for knowledge and the confidence to become successful learners.
Within our Nursery and Reception classes we provide a learning environment which aims to be happy, challenging and engaging. We understand the importance of learning through play which enables each child to communicate their ideas, to understand others through social interaction, and which paves the way to build deeper understanding and more powerful relationships.
To support the coverage of our curriculum, our carefully planned high-quality challenges, allows our children to draw upon their prior learning and build upon these skills to master their technique. Our children learn skills, acquire new knowledge and demonstrate their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development, which takes place both indoors and outside. Children should mostly develop the 3 prime areas first. These are:
Communication and Language
Physical Development
Personal Social and Emotional development.
As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in 4 specific areas. These are:
Literacy
Mathematics
Understanding the world
Expressive Arts and Design.
A balance of child-initiated and adult-led play based activities, using our continuous play and small group activities, helps each child to make progress across these seven areas of learning. Teachers regularly deploy these two different styles of teaching in order to give pupils a variety of learning experiences.
Our children and their families are central in our vision to work together to deliver the best education possible for our children to begin their love of learning.
