In Early Years, our curriculum supports pupils’ progress in the seven areas of learning and development identified in the Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage.  These seven areas are divided into the Prime Areas and the Specific Areas.

The Prime Areas lay vital foundations in the early years.  They describe universal, core aspects of early child development.  All three Prime areas are always in action for a young child, no matter what specific learning or activity is taking place.

The Prime Areas include:

• Communication and Language

• Physical Development

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development

The Specific Areas provide children with the knowledge and skills they need to flourish in their future learning and as a citizen in society.  Some aspects of the Specific Areas arise naturally as children grow and take note of the world around them, while adults support children in learning about other aspects.

The Specific Areas include:

• Literacy

• Mathematics

• Understanding the World

• Expressive Arts and Design

In addition to ensuring our curriculum promotes development in each of the Prime and Specific Areas, we also embed the three Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning into our curriculum and delivery:

• 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 achievements

• Creating and thinking critically – children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things  

Similarly to the Prime Areas, these characteristics are woven throughout all activities a child undertakes, and developing in these areas supports children to develop strong habits of mind and behaviours that will continue to support them to discover, think, create, solve problems and self-regulate their learning as they grow.  

In the Early Years, children learn through play, by adults modelling, by observing each other, and through guided learning and direct teaching.  As such, our curriculum is delivered through a mixture of adult-led and child-initiated activities.  Each half term, our learning centres on a particular topic, chosen to ensure that all areas of learning are developed.   Our curriculum is deliberately ambitious, and is carefully sequenced in order to ensure that all pupils master the knowledge, skills and understanding that all young children should have gained by the end of their time in EYFS.    

The information below provides more detail about how pupils learn about each area of the Early Years framework at Roxbourne.  It is important to note that all of the areas of learning are equally important, and are inter-connected - so any one learning opportunity is likely to have been designed to encourage development across several areas of learning.  Our Early Years teachers meet each week to ensure that our teacher-led sessions, as well as the activities we set up for pupils to access during their independent learning, will meet the ever-changing needs and interests of our pupils - so you will notice that our classrooms constantly change and evolve with the children!

Communication and language:

At Roxbourne, we ensure that pupils are surrounded by good role models for speaking and conversation, and are encouraged and supported to speak themselves as often as possible.  Communication and Language is threaded throughout our curriculum, rather than being taught discreetly: for example, a Maths, RE, or Science carpet session may have a focus on speaking, resources in the classroom are planned to spark conversation during independent learning, and children are encouraged to talk amongst themselves during snack times and lunch times.

Staff employ principles that support speech and language in all lessons, such as introducing key vocabulary at the start of every lesson, using dual coding to do so where possible, embedding talk partner tasks, providing sentence starters, and asking pupils to respond to all questions in full sentences.  

We also teach pupils to listen to each other, rather than simply waiting for their turn to speak, for example by ensuring no hands are up while someone is speaking, and that everyone is watching the speaker. 

Throughout the day, pupils will take part in a number of conversations, in both small and large groups as well as in teacher- and child-led scenarios.  For example, pupils will engage in whole class discussion with the teacher about what they think might happen next in a story during story time, and will also engage with their peers in conversation during their meal at lunch.

Physical development - gross motor skills:

We have a large and well equipped outdoor area exclusively for our EYFS pupils, who are able to take their independent learning outdoors every day.  

In the outdoor classroom, we encourage children to use their muscles, energy, and co-ordination to take part in activities such as obstacle courses, den building, water play, construction, and climbing.  Teachers carefully consider which activities to guide particular pupils to throughout the week in order to further develop their gross motor skills.   

In addition to these activities, which are available throughout the week, our Early Years pupils have a dedicated weekly PE lesson with a specialist sports teacher.  We follow the Get Set 4 PE curriculum, which supports our pupils with their Gross Motor Skills through topics such as dance, gymnastics and ball games.

Physical development - fine motor skills:

We provide pupils with many opportunities to develop their fine motor skills throughout the school day.  

During Phonics and Writing lessons, and whenever we are modeling writing or supporting pupils with their writing, we model using the tripod grip to hold our pens and pencils and how to correctly form our letters.  This pencil control is reinforced when modeling drawing and mark making, where we encourage pupils to attribute meaning to the marks they make, and talk through our drawings and models to explain our creative choices.

In our classrooms, pupils have access to a variety of resources with which to challenge and develop their fine motor skills.  For example, the Dough Gym is available throughout the year, where pupils can manipulate play dough with their hands and a range of tools to achieve various effects.  The art area features a changing range of resources with which to express themselves creatively: for example, pens, pencils and chalk, collage materials, junk modeling, paints and more.  In addition to this, pupils are supported to use cutlery at lunch times, pour their own drinks in the self-serve snack areas, and be independent in putting on and removing outdoor clothing, doing up shoe laces and zips.  All of this supports pupils in meeting the expected standard in Fine Motor Skills by the end of Reception.

Personal, social and emotional development:

Personal, Social, and Emotional Development is something that we support our pupils with throughout their time in Early Years.

Sometimes, these skills are taught in discrete lessons: for example, we explicitly teach pupils behaviour expectations and how to use the toilet facilities at the start of the year, both of which are essential elements of Managing Self. We also have a designated PSHE lesson each week, which takes the form of a circle time and covers various topics across PSED.

Alongside this explicit teaching, we believe that staff embodying the principles and modelling them throughout the day is a powerful way of teaching pupils these life skills: for example, a teacher engaging in friendly conversation with parents, pupils, visitors and colleagues each day is an effective way of teaching children how to develop appropriate relationships with peers and adults.

Literacy - comprehension:

Alongside our rigorous phonics teaching, we place a strong emphasis on supporting pupils to develop their understanding of what they read in EYFS.  As part of our literacy cycle, pupils spend time every day learning about a story in depth: learning new vocabulary, thinking about who the characters are, how they feel and why they act the way they do, and practicing retelling the story. 

In addition to the texts used in literacy sessions, pupils encounter a number of other books each week during storytime, which is embedded as part of our dismissal routine.  There are also a variety of texts available throughout the week in each classroom’s reading area, along with props, such as character puppets, to support pupils with acting out and building on the story in their own words if they so choose.

Through this shared bank of stories, pupils become familiar with common narrative features and are quickly able to use this growing knowledge to anticipate events in new stories that they come across, identify links between different stories, and invent their own.

Literacy - word reading: 

At Roxbourne, we follow the Read, Write Inc phonics programme.  As the UK’s leading synthetic phonics programme, it gives all pupils the best possible chance to meet the expected standard for the phonics screening check in Year 1.  The foundations for this success begin in Nursery, when pupils are first introduced to the sounds each letter makes, and continue in Reception, when all pupils receive daily phonics teaching.

Our school environment gives pupils plenty of opportunities to practise their new found reading skills throughout the day.  Our classrooms are ‘print rich’, which means that there are a wealth of interactive displays for pupils to read and respond to, and every classroom has its own reading corner with a variety of age appropriate texts for the pupils to enjoy during their independent learning time.

Literacy - writing:

Writing is one of the most demanding tasks we ask our pupils to take part in, and we do as much as we can to support them in being successful as well as learning to love this crucial skill.  

Our phonics lessons teach pupils the mechanics of writing, including letter formation and how to segment words into their individual sounds. In addition to this, pupils take part in whole class shared writing lessons, as well as smaller weekly writing focus groups as part of our literacy cycle.  In Nursery, teaching focuses on being able to talk about, act out and tell stories orally, using story maps to help us.  In Reception, this develops into being able to record what we have to say on paper. 

Our curriculum teaches pupils writing in a variety of forms, including writing for real world purposes such as shopping lists, recipes, and invitations, as well as stories, riddles and poems.  This encourages pupils to write with purpose and with pleasure, as well as with technical accuracy.

Mathematics:

At Roxbourne, we follow the Maths Mastery programme of study, which offers a research-based and carefully sequenced curriculum for pupils in Reception through to Year 6.  We have taken the principles from Maths Mastery and applied them to our own tailor-made Nursery mathematics curriculum, which ensures that pupils are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed when they progress to the Reception programme and beyond.

Each day, pupils in the EYFS have multiple opportunities to develop their mathematical thinking, both through teacher-led sessions and through child-led independent learning.  During daily Maths Meetings, pupils practise the fundamentals of mathematics, such as calendar maths and place value, through short and snappy songs and routines.  Mathematics carpet sessions build upon these fundamentals by focusing on particular mathematical units, such as shape or addition and subtraction, and pupils have a further chance to consolidate this learning in small group focus sessions each week.  In addition to these teacher-led maths sessions, we embed opportunities for pupils to develop their problem solving and mathematical thinking in our continuous provision - for example, by including different shaped and sized containers in the sand and water areas through which pupils can explore capacity, providing tools to measure the plants in our outdoor area, or numbering our resources so that pupils can count to check they are all there at tidy up time.

Understanding the world:

In the Early Years, we enable children to develop their understanding of the world both through establishing an enabling environment for this to happen naturally, and also by carefully planning our adult-led instruction. 

We ensure that pupils have the time, freedom, and opportunity to follow their interests and broaden their understanding of the world through encountering new experiences, people and objects.  This might include stopping to observe and discuss construction vehicles at work on a school trip, noticing how the puddles in the playground freeze when it is cold, or sharing pupils’ experiences of family celebrations during Show and Tell.  

In addition, we ensure that our teacher-led instruction covers the content we believe pupils need to know to be successful in Key Stage One and beyond.  This content is delivered during carpet sessions focusing on our half termly topics, as well as in dedicated RE and Science lessons in Reception.  In both Nursery and Reception, adults will also direct pupils’ attention to certain points of interest in our conversations and in the resources we set out in the classroom for the children to explore independently - for example, setting up an autumn investigation area for pupils to explore changing leaves, pine cones and conkers, or displaying photographs of staff members as babies and children in order to spark conversation about changes over time.

Expressive arts and design:

Creativity is embedded throughout our Early Years curriculum.  For example, in addition to dedicated weekly Music lessons with a specialist teacher for our Reception pupils, children sing songs in Maths every day (ask them to sing you the Days of the Week song!), practise acting out the stories they read as part of their literacy lessons, and have multiple opportunities to use their imaginations in our continuous provision: role play, art, and music areas are always available.  Furthermore, all our Early Years pupils take part in our nativity performance.