EYFS AT NORTHWAY
At Northway, we believe that the first years in education are a vital time to instil a love of learning and equip children with lifelong communication and personal skills, preparing them for their future learning journey. Children learn best when they are happy, secure and have a high sense of wellbeing. Staff place a strong emphasis on providing our children with a safe and friendly environment in which to thrive. Through play experiences and purposeful teaching, our children become confident to explore and enthusiastic to learn.
Across the year, we explore our school values and place a strong focus on nurturing children to become resilient, confident and independent learners. This is achieved through an ethos of metacognition, teacher scaffolding and restorative and relational practice. As a restorative and relational practice school, we ensure that all interactions are underpinned by respect, empathy, and the building of positive relationships. This approach supports children’s personal, social and emotional development and underpins every aspect of learning. Personal, social and emotional development, alongside the teaching of communication and language skills, form the foundations for learning at Northway. We consider social skills and positive interactions with adults and peers crucial for children to be able to learn and thrive.
We build on children’s prior learning from previous settings and from home to ensure that learning is meaningful, relevant and tailored to individual needs, interests and learning styles. We strive to promote the holistic development of all children in order to build a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning. Through progressive planning and teaching, we ensure that all our pupils are ‘school ready’ academically, personally, socially and emotionally.
High expectations and aspirations are set for all children to achieve their full potential and to become competent in the basic skills of communication, reading, writing and number, so that many possibilities are made available to them as they progress through the school.
During the EYFS practitioners prepare children for current and future learning by:
- ensuring excellence in teaching and learning delivered through a well-planned, rich and varied curriculum
- encouraging children to be self-motivated and to develop a positive attitude towards their learning
- promoting and nurturing individual liberty and respect for ourselves, others and the world around us
- developing global citizens so children leave us with an understanding of their rights and responsibilities within the wider world.
- ensuring that restorative and relational practice underpins all of our interactions
- explicitly teaching high quality oracy skills to support the development of effective communication skills
Our work in the EYFS enables our pupils to develop:
- Communication skills
- A strong awareness of their own and others’ physical and mental health needs and how best to support these
- A strong sense of belonging
- A love of learning
- Independence
- Strong foundations in the basic skills.
The learning journey begins by weaving personal, social and emotional development skills into all that we do, in order to create pupils that are ready to learn. We cultivate an ethos where pupils are emboldened to ‘have a go’, we model how to embrace new challenges and guide children to celebrate their achievements and relish new goals. Self-belief and positive attitudes underpin our foundations for learning and from here we support all pupils to achieve their full potential. Staff are trained to use restorative and relational practices that support children to communicate effectively. Restorative and relational practices are embedded in daily routines, circle times, conflict resolution, and staff-pupil interactions. Staff model respectful communication, encourage children to reflect on their choices, and support them in repairing relationships when difficulties arise.
High quality communication skills are prioritised across the setting. Explicitly taught oracy skills are embedded within our curriculum. We believe that teaching children to have a voice, speak effectively and listen carefully is essential so that they have the skills to communicate clearly.
Developing a love of reading and the skills to be able to read, is a high priority in our EYFS. Carefully sequenced reading progression and systematic phonics teaching lies at the heart of our learning foundations. Daily writing sessions build on the knowledge acquired in reading and phonics, and through a range of high-quality texts, linked to our themes, the children begin to explore and develop a love of writing.
The exploration of number is planned for daily, in a series of progressive lessons, so that by the end of Reception, pupils are fluent with the value of numbers up to twenty and have strong mental recall of number bonds to ten, giving them the foundations to support their learning as they enter Year One and beyond.
Exploration of the world around us is planned into our weekly sessions, so that the pupils develop a broad and rich knowledge base from which all future learning can be built upon. We start by learning about the immediate world around the children and then branch out. Taught knowledge links to future learning at Northway, and therefore our pupils are equipped with the prior understanding to enable them to flourish throughout the school. The creative, technological and physical skills that children need to master are started in the Nursery. All learning is linked to a theme to add purpose and meaning to all the knowledge acquired.
We work closely with parents and carers to provide a personalised and supportive curriculum for each child.