Early Years Foundation Stage
Children in our Early Years Foundation Stage (Nursery and Reception) can expect a warm and welcoming environment. Our team of highly skilled and experienced practitioners work hard to ensure your child is safe, happy and makes as much progress as possible, consolidating their learning through play.
As it name suggests the first two years of their education at Silver Springs build the foundations for all their future learning and is vitally important in preparing them for their future successes. As well as the teacher-led focused learning activities each day there are so many exciting ways to learn both inside and out.
The ways in which your child engages with other people and their environment – playing and exploring, active learning, and creating and thinking critically – underpin learning and development across all areas. We call these the Characteristics of Effective Learning. Observations of how your child plays and learns will help support our team to provide them with everything your child needs to learn new skills.
Playing and exploring (engagement) – Finding out and exploring, playing with what they know, being willing to ‘have a go’
Active learning (motivation) – Being involved and concentrating, keeping trying, enjoying achieving what they set out to do
Creating and thinking critically – Having their own ideas, making links, choosing ways to do things
Areas of Learning
The Prime Areas of Learning are: Communication and Language; Physical Development; and Personal, Social and Emotional Development. These prime areas are those most essential for your child’s healthy development and future learning. As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in 4 specific areas.
These are: Literacy; Mathematics; Understanding the world; and Expressive Arts and Design. These 7 areas are used to plan your child’s learning and activities. We will support your child to ensure that the activities are suited to your child’s unique needs. If children require a little extra support in any of the areas, we will provide this alongside our usual daily lessons and activities.
Our Principles
All children are entitled to high quality learning and teaching. This will equip them with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need today and prepare them well for tomorrow.
Children learn at different rates and each child’s development is unique.
Effective teaching and learning in EYFS meets children’s identified needs and interests and helps children to learn and develop in all seven areas of learning and development.
Every child can progress well in their learning, with the right support. Every child can thrive.
Some learning is sequential and some is less so. Maths and phonics require firm foundations on which to build. Learning about the world is less sequential and requires adults to build on interests, widening horizons and providing opportunities. Different learning requires different approaches.
The development of positive relationships is a fundamental requirement to ensure that children are happy, secure and actively involved in their own learning. Ensuring that children build a positive self-image is essential in building learning resilience and a ‘can-do’ approach to learning.
Communication between parents and staff is essential to support transitions into Nursery, Reception and then onto Key Stage One. Nursery should prepare the children well for Reception and Reception should prepare them well for Key Stage One, so that they can confidently transition, building on past and current learning.
Learning in the Foundation Stage
- Learning is a combination of play, whole class, small group and one-to-one sessions, inside and out.
- Adults value children’s self-initiated learning and carefully intervene to extend and consolidate.
- Parental involvement is crucial and we learn a great deal about each child from their parents. To support our parents to help their children to get the best start we provide Parent Gym and run the REAL project.
We love books!
Engaging our children with a range of high quality texts is a top priority for us! We want to ensure that all our children develop a lifelong love of reading. We choose our texts from our reading spine. Take a look at some of the texts that your child will encounter over their time in EYFS.
At Silver Springs, we believe that a strong start in learning the phonic code is the key to unlocking the world of books and reading and is essential for ensuring that they are able to access the wider curriculum. Find out more about our Phonics Curriculum here.
Our Curriculum Ambitions
The curriculum is designed to acknowledge the strengths and needs of the children from the surrounding area. In Nursery, the main focus of learning is the Prime Areas to establish strong foundations on which to build future learning.
To ensure that all our children have the best possible language development, we provide an in-house Speech and Language Therapist so interventions can be delivered promptly without the lengthy wait of a referral. In addition to this we provide the WellCom intervention in Nursery and Nuffield Early Language Intervention in Reception.
Our curricular ambitions take us beyond what is universally expected to provide a bespoke curriculum for our children. We have developed progressions for each of the ambitions to help parents, carers and staff to ensure that children are on the right track. In addition to our ten ambitions, we have also worked with subject leaders to ensure that our curriculum prepares children with the prerequisite knowledge and vocabulary that they need to access the Year One curriculum. Click on the links below to find out more about what your child will be learning over the course of EYFS and how it links to learning later in school.
