1

ST MICHAEL’S EAST WICKHAM

CE PRIMARY SCHOOL

Early Years

Policy

At St Michael’s Primary School we seek to nurture the whole child and instil a love of learning by inspiring young minds within a happy, caring community based on the Christian values of love; joy; kindness; peace and faithfulness.

Reviewed January 2018

EARLY YEARS POLICY

PHILOSOPHY

The philosophy of the Early Years’ Education is to develop the whole child in a secure, safe, friendly and stable environment. This will only be achieved if there is full understanding and co-operation by all concerned with the education of young children. We must seek to create an effective transition from home to school and to develop a working partnership between these two environments.

Children will deepen their understanding in the areas of learning through talking, playing, observing, planning, questioning and experimenting, reflecting and responding to adults and each other. The curriculum for the Early Years Foundation Stage will underpin all future learning by supporting, fostering, promoting and developing the whole child.

AIMS

We aim to develop all aspects of the young child:

  • Personal
  • Social
  • Emotional
  • Spiritual
  • Physical
  • Intellectual
  • Aesthetic and Creative

The children have had varying experiences before entering school. Consequently they will each react differently to the school environment. The children will all have equal opportunities and be provided with the appropriate tools in order for them to achieve their maximum potential, therefore enabling them to develop positive skills and attitudes at a suitable rate of progression during the academic year. We aim for the children to become increasingly self-reliant, independent, self-disciplined as well as having the ability to develop a caring attitude to others within the safe and caring surroundings of a school environment in which the children are willing, eager and happy to learn.

Our aims are:

  • To support children in becoming competent and confident learners.
  • To provide a safe and stimulating environment in which creativity and expressiveness are valued.
  • To provide a broad and balanced curriculum for every child.
  • To provide a structure for learning that has a range of starting points, content that matches the needs of young children and activity that provides opportunities for learning both indoors and outdoors.
  • To provide a rich and stimulating environment.
  • To provide a prayerful environment where children’s spiritual needs are supported and where they can learn more about God.
  • To encourage children to take part in collective worship and the spiritual life of the school.
  • To involve parents with their child’s learning.

SKILLS TO BE ACQUIRED

Motor skills:

  • Children will be encouraged to develop hand-eye

co-ordination, fine and gross motor skills.

Communication skills

  • Children will be encouraged to ask questions, to recall information to predict, to explain, to follow directions and instructions, to discuss observations.
  • To interact with other children and adults confidently.

Social skills

  • Children will be encouraged to learn to share, to participate in-group activities, to develop a caring attitude towards people, other living things and materials within the environment.
  • To be aware that other children and adults also have rights and that everybody is different.

Listening skills

  • Children will be provided with the opportunity and encouraged to listen to a variety of stimuli and different sounds.
  • To be able to participate as a group member in simple experiments.
  • To listen to and follow instructions and concentrate.
  • To participate as both a speakerand as a listener to other ideas.

Discrimination skills

Children should be encouraged to:

  • Notice similarities and differences and be able to discuss them.
  • To be able to order and arrange things in sequence.
  • To be able to sort and classify according to certain criteria.
  • To be able to follow and extend patterns
  • Demonstrate a good understanding.

THE CURRICULUM: The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)

The EYFS principles which guide the work of all practitioners in the key stage are grouped into four distinct but complementary themes:

  • A Unique Child
  • Positive Relationships
  • Enabling Environments
  • Learning and Development

A Unique Child: recognises that every child is a competent learner from birth who can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured. The commitments are focussed around development, inclusion, safety and health and well-being.

Positive Relationships:describes how children learn to be strong and independent from a base of loving and secure relationships with parents and key people. The commitments are focussed around respecting each other, partnership with parents, supporting learning and the role of the key person which is the class teacher in our setting.

Enabling Environments: explains that the environment plays a key role in supporting and extending children’s development and learning. The commitments are focussed around observation, assessment and planning, support for every child; the learning environment; and the wider context – transitions, continuity and multi-agency working.

Learning and Development: recognises that children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates; and that all areas of learning and development are equally important and inter-connected.

The EYFS Curriculum:

Working around the above four themes, the EYFS curriculum embodies three PRIME areas and four SPECIFIC areas of learning and development. The Prime areas recognise the importance of basic skills, which are to be harnessed and developed from a child’s birth – right through the EYFS, whilst the Specific areas recognise the importance of developing more specific skills in preparation for KEY STAGE 1. They are all-important and rely on each other to support a rounded approach to child development. All of these areas are delivered through planned, purposeful play, with a balance of adult and child led activities.

The areas of learning are as follows:

Prime:

  • Communication and Language:

Development involves giving children opportunities to experience a rich language environment; to develop their confidence and skills in expressing themselves; and to speak and listen in a range of situations.

  • Physical Development:

This involves providing opportunities for young children to be active and interactive; and to develop their co-ordination, control and movement. Children must also be helped to understand the importance of physical activity and to make healthy choices in relation to food.

  • Personal, Social and Emotional Development:

Involves helping children to develop a positive sense of themselves and others. They need to develop positive relationships and develop respect for others. The children are helped to develop social skills and learn how to manage their feelings. They learn to understand appropriate behaviour in groups and to have confidence in their own abilities.

Specific:

  • Literacy;

This development involves encouraging children to link sounds and lettersas well asbeginning to read and write. Children must be given access to a wide range of reading materials to ignite their interest.

  • Mathematics

This includes providing children with opportunities to develop and improve their skills in counting, understanding and using numbers. It involves calculating simple addition and subtraction problems and learn to describe shape, space and measures.

  • Understanding the World

This involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community through opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places, technology and the environment.

  • Expressive Arts and Design

This includes enabling children to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials as well as providing opportunities and encouragement for sharing their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a variety of activities in art, music, movement, dance, role play and Design and Technology.

Characteristics of Effective Learning

During their time in Early Years, we will be looking at how the children learn.

Playing and exploring- engagement:

  • Finding out and exploring
  • Playing with what they know
  • Be willing to ‘have a go’

Active learning- motivation:

  • Being involved and concentrating
  • Keep trying
  • Enjoying achieving what they set out to do

Creating and thinking critically- thinking

  • Having their own ideas
  • Making links
  • Choosing ways to do things

Play in the EYFS

Through play, children explore and develop learning experiences; which help them to make sense of the world. They practise and build up ideas. The children learn how to control themselves and learn to understand the need for rules. Play also provides the opportunity to think creatively alongside other children as well as on their own. Children learn to communicate with others as they investigate and solve problems.

Play should be planned for in the curriculum. Well-planned play, both indoors and outdoors, is a key way in which young children learn with enjoyment and challenge, whilst also interacting with one-another and enhancing social skills. We aim to provide an environment which encourages surprise and novelty in the learning of new concepts, thus enhancing the child’s pleasure. If a child associates learning with pleasure this becomes the ideal situation for that child to thrive. We aim to achieve an environment which provides children with opportunities to investigate their individual interests. One which gives children choices, and one which provides an atmosphere of trust in which children can ask questions without fear of making mistakes.

Assessment

Observations are used to assess the children during child initiated and adult led activities. These observations are used to make judgements against the appropriate assessment tools used in the EYFS. These observations are also used to inform future planning.

While most assessments are made through observations, some assessments, such as the phonic assessments, require teacher-child 1-2-1 time and discussion. Where ever possible, the objective which you wish to work on with a child, should be incorporated into an activity the child is interested in.

Assessments should take many forms included in the following:

  • Photographs Examples of work
  • Observations – both long and incidental

All staff in the setting are expected to observe throughout the day. Parental information is valued as are the observations of staff in the wider environment, such as Midday Meal Supervisors. Children are assessed using the ‘Early Years Outcomes’, ‘Development Matters’, stages of progress, which match children to appropriate age bands according to their progress.

As the children move through their learning and development, they are also assessed against the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile, which consists of 17 statements, covering all aspects of learning. These assessments are collated and analysed every half term for monitoring purposes. The information is stored on the computer.We use ‘Tapestry’ – to compile a learning journey for each child. It allows staff to gather and store evidence of each child’s progress. Target Tracker is used to track progress.

Planning

A variety of adult led and child initiated activities are used to develop children’s learning. Observations are used to find out about their interests and these help to make the activities in class relevant and interesting to the children, as well as developing their progress in all areas of learning. Whole class focus groups are planned for each week, along with carpet sessions, to ensure that the focus groups match the learning needs of the children. Planning objectives taken from the Early Years Outcomes and activities are usually skill based rather than task based. However, where specific knowledge is also part of the objective, this should also be taught. Whilst activities are planned for in advance, flexibility is the key. Children may need extra reinforcement before moving on, or the children may need extending in their learning and understanding of a topic. Child initiated play is encouraged right from the beginning and every effort is made to ensure the environment enables this.

Phonics

There is a daily phonics session following the Letters and Sounds Programme. These sessions focus on phase 2 through to phase 3.

Reading

It is important that our children develop a love of reading. We aim to provide literate environment to encourage this:

  • A wide variety of books including information books
  • A cosy book corner
  • Labels and pictures on resources
  • Labels and pictures around the class room, to develop children’s understanding of meaningful words

The children also take home their own phonic reading book. The children are encouraged to read to adults at home and are heard read on a regular basis (often daily) by adults in the setting.

Writing

The children are encouraged to ‘mark make’ in many ways. The environment should reflect this and provide the children with many different opportunities, both inside and outside, to encourage this.

To help with the development of the cursive script, the school has recently obtained‘Letter Join’, which will be adopted by all classes in the school. For children in Reception they are initially taught the letters with the flicks, with the aim of them attempting joining later in the year.

Transition

From Pre-school/Feeder settings

During the summer term prior to a child’s entry into the Reception year, the following procedures have been put into place to ensure successful transition.

  • Parents are invited to a meeting to ensure they know about school procedures and allocation of classes and any concerns they may want to express.
  • The children are invited to two separate visits to their reception class, without parents.
  • Members of staff from St Michael’s East Wickham CE VA Primary School, make visits to feeder settings. The number of visits will depend on the child’s needs and how much information gathering is required in order to support the child’s transition.
  • Children requiring extra support will have additional visits regardless of their setting. Often these children will have been identified as requiring additional support or are part of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) process.
  • The SENCO attends transition meetings with the SENCO/Key Workers of pre-school/feeder settings.

From Reception Class to Key Stage 1

During the final term in Reception, the EYFS Profile is completed for each child. The Profile provides parents and carers, staff and teachers with a well-rounded picture of a child’s knowledge, understanding and abilities, their progress against expected levels, and their readiness for Year 1. The Profile includes on-going observation, all relevant records held by the setting, discussions with parents and carers, and any other adults whom the teacher, parent or carer judges can offer a useful contribution.

Inclusion

In our school we believe that all of our children matter. We aim to give our children every opportunity to achieve their best. We try to take in to account our children’s range of life experiences when planning for their learning.

We aim to set realistic and challenging expectations and targets that meet the needs of our children, so that they have the opportunity to achieve the Early Learning Goals by the end of the Key Stage. Some children progress beyond this point.

We achieve this by planning to meet the needs of boys and girls, children with special needs, children who are more able, children with disabilities, children from all social and cultural backgrounds, children of different ethnic groups and those from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Equal opportunities

All children follow a curriculum which enables them to make maximum progress towards the Early Learning Goals. Children whose achievements exceed the ELGs should be provided with opportunities which extend their knowledge, understanding and skills. These opportunities should include more challenging activities, careful questioning andproblem solving activities. Other children will require support for achieving all or some of the outcomes after entering compulsory education.

Special Education Needs

We follow the statutory Code of Practice on the identification and assessment of children with special educational needs and the requirements as they apply to the under-five’s.

Health and Safety

We follow our school’s guidelines on health and safety. We ensure that during the school day, the children are kept safe as well as making sure that when being dismissed, the children are released to their parents or authorised adult.

Safeguarding

Changes in the EYFS statutory framework 2014 have been incorporated. All staff in the setting are DBS checked and all use of digital imagery are solely on school equipment, which is stored in the school’s public drive and does not leave the premises on individual devices.