Early Years

Overview

At Bayton CE Primary School, we believe that a strong start in Early Years lays the foundations for a successful journey throughout a child’s education. This is delivered through; a high-quality, enabling learning environment that supports, challenges and inspires children; provision of well-planned learning opportunities which support the individual needs of every child and quality interactions between our children and staff who have positive, mutual relationships. We believe that every child has the potential to flourish and everyone can make progress if provided with the right support in the early years.

Intent

Every child is unique and we celebrate this in our setting. As children progress through our curriculum, we aspire for them to be critical thinkers, resilient learners and ambitious individuals. Our children will grow in confidence and independence whilst developing a love of learning that will set them up for a strong start in their education. We aspire to develop and deepen children’s skills and knowledge across all areas of our curriculum and set children up with a vast and varied vocabulary for them to be able to flourish in all areas of learning.

Implementation

We follow the Early Years Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, updated in 2021, by the DfE. This framework specifies the requirement for learning and development in the Early Years and provides prime and specific areas of learning we must cover in our curriculum. The curriculum is based on 7 areas of learning; Personal, Social and Emotional Development; Physical Development; Communication and Language; Literacy; Mathematics; Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and Design. Here at Bayton we have designed our EYFS curriculum to have a theme to explore each half term. However the way in which we explore these themes reflects the interests and curiosity of the children; pupil voice is essential to successful teaching and learning. We strongly embed the Characteristics of Effective Learning and encourage the children to be explorers, critical thinkers and active learners. The children develop their learning behaviours through our Characteristics of Effective Learning characters; our busy bee, wise owl and creative unicorn. We spend lots of our time learning outdoors, in all weathers, exploring our natural world, taking and assessing risks and developing our teamwork skills. We have a strong emphasis on language and vocabulary within EYFS and love nothing better to explore our songs and rhymes bag, wonderful words box or basket of stories throughout our school day. Positive relationships are formed even before September with our careful transition period and these are built upon throughout the year.