Early Years Foundation Stage
Early Years Foundation Stage
Welcome to the Early Years Foundation Stage at Northiam Primary School. We are passionate about delivering the best for every child. We aim to do this by providing a Nurturing and stimulating Learning environment full of awe and wonder as our pupils take those first steps of discovery, a bespoke curriculum that meets the needs and interests of our pupils and working in partnership with our Parents and Carers.
The Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum is organised into seven areas of learning. Three Prime areas: Personal, Social and Emotional Development, Physical Development and Communication and Language. There are then four further Specific Areas: Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and Design.
When planning and guiding what our children learn we also consider the Characteristics of Effective
Learning which 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 their achievements.
Creating and Thinking Critically: children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas and develop strategies for doing things.
Our curriculum is delivered across the EYFS using a combination of engaging experiences, focused adult led inputs and invitations to play; both in our carefully planned indoor provision and in our fantastic outdoor spaces. The natural seasonal cycle and the interests and needs of the children are interwoven into our curriculum delivery alongside our Christian Values of Fellowships, Trust, Humility, Compassion, courage and Thankfulness.
At Northiam we are passionate about creating Readers for Life. Phonics Teaching begins in our pre-school where we aim to foster a deep love of reading and focus on pre-phonics skills such as rhyme and building phonological awareness. In Reception our Children begin to learn the sounds the letters of the alphabet make and the Graphemes that represent them. Once the children have learned several sounds they are then able to blend them together to read words and segment them to spell them.
Similarly Maths also begins in pre-school where we provide our pupils with the opportunity to build the early Maths skills across a variety of contexts that they need to prepare them for Reception.
Our Learning Environment
Our indoor classrooms have been planned to promote all areas of learning including communication, physical development, creativity, early Maths and mark making. We have a variety of outdoor spaces, both under cover and open, that we can use all year round to provide different learning opportunities. We also are very fortunate to use the school grounds too including Forest School, the field and Trim Trails and not forgetting visits to see the goats!
