Early Years Foundation Stage

“Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play, children learn how to learn.”- F Donaldson

The Early Years Foundation Stage is the statutory curriculum for children from Birth to 5 years old. At Warren Mead we teach the EYFS through ages 3 to 5 in our Nursery and Reception classes. 

EYFS Curriculum

The Early Years curriculum is based on seven areas of learning. The children will learn new skills, acquire new knowledge and demonstrate understanding through the seven areas in the EYFS curriculum.

The Prime Areas:

Personal, social and emotional development

Physical development

Communication and language

The Specific Areas:

Mathematics

Literacy

Understanding the world

Expressive arts and design

“Play is the highest form of research”

- Albert Einstein

Ensuring a Smooth Transition into EYFS 

Here at Warren Mead, we believe all children in our school community should be given the best possible start in their learning and education. We want children to feel confident and excited to start their school journey with us, so we work closely with parents as partners and our local pre-schools to ensure we know the children well as individuals before they being their journey of learning with us. To help give your child the smoothest transition possible, we offer the following. 

• Home visits from our teaching team, including an extra home visit for children with SEND needs from the EYFS phase leader and our Inclusion Leader. 

• Stay and play sessions, where children and families have the opportunity to explore and play in the classrooms before joining us. 

• Induction booklets – these include pictures of your child’s teaching team, classroom, where we hang our coats, where we go to the toilet and where we eat our lunch. 

• Virtual story time videos from the EYFS team. 

Vision

At Warren Mead, we build upon children’s prior learning from other settings and experiences from home. We ensure our children develop a love of learning through our exciting and engaging curriculum that is responsive to children, cohort and community needs. We believe communication is key to all learning and are passionate that all children should be able to communicate their ideas and feelings with others. We use Makaton sign language within our lessons and learning to support children’s communication. 

Through planned, purposeful play and adult led teaching, our curriculum encourages children to become independent, motivated learners who are curious about the world around them. We strive to challenge our children with their learning and thinking, whilst nurturing them in a secure and happy environment. Our children are encouraged to take risks, explore and enquire both inside the classroom environment through continuous and enhanced learning provision, and in our fantastic outdoor learning environment. We learn outside in all weather! Working with parents as partners, we ensure each of our children make good progress during their time with us, allowing for a smooth transition from EYFS at the end of Reception into Key Stage 1. 

How EYFS children learn at Warren Mead

At this stage in a child’s life, learning through play is vital to develop children’s communication skills and support children in becoming learners.  

We support learning through play within our carefully planned continuous provision, areas of learning that are in our environment each day for children to explore their own creativity and ideas and revisit and review learning. Through our enhanced provision and adult led activities we work closely on our children’s and cohort’s next steps of learning using carefully planned for exciting and engaging activities of learning as well as group and whole class lessons. 

Each half term we have an over-arching theme of learning, to excite and engage the children, based around our children and community’s interests. Within these themes we offer exciting and enriching learning opportunities.

Staff record evidence of children’s learning to build an overall picture and set next steps for learning. Evidence is captured of the children in all the areas of learning through the online platform Tapestry and through collecting learning in our Learning Journey folders. Our families are encouraged to contribute to their child’s learning through Tapestry, our online Learning Journey. Assessment takes place within every session and helps teachers to identify any children that need more support to achieve the objective and those that need challenging further.  

The EYFS Profile

The EYFS Profile is completed at the end of the year in Reception.  Each child’s level of development must be assessed against the Early Learning Goals.  Practitioners must indicate whether children are meeting expected levels of development, or not yet reaching expected levels (‘emerging’). This information is shared with parent/carers and passed onto Year 1 teachers.