Little Gems 2024 - 2025
Children’s Learning and Development
The provision for children’s learning and development is guided by the Early Years Foundation Stage, this sets out what and how your child will be learning to support their healthy development.
Your child will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge and demonstrating their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development.
Children should first develop the 3 prime areas, these are:
· Communication and Language
· Physical Development
· Personal, Social, Emotional Development
These prime areas are most essential to your child’s healthy development and future learning. As your child grows, the prime areas will help them develop skills in four specific areas. These are;
· Literacy
· Mathematics
· Understanding the World
· Expressive Arts and Design
These 7 areas are used to plan our curriculum and planning.
Our Curriculum
We use the documents entitled 'Development Matters' and 'Birth to Five' to inform both our planning and assessment. We have designed our curriculum to address the needs of the children attending and the community we are a part of. As such, our curriculum is always evolving. It is rich with practical experiences and combines both adult and child led learning which foster curiosity and a sense of ownership from both staff and learners.
The characteristics of effective learning underpin all elements of our curriculum. We have three broad themes and work within one of these each term. In the autumn it is 'Ourselves', in the spring it is 'Homes' and in the summer our theme is titled 'Journeys'. This allows us to layer our curriculum with the teaching of fundamental skills at the different developmental stages of our children.
Within these themes we refine our topics further and link the learning to a carefully chosen text or texts. This enables the children to build meaningful links between their experiences and learning whilst combining their skills from the seventeen different areas as documented in 'Development Matters'.
We personalise the delivery of our curriculum; we teach in small groups, whole classes or one to one as the individual child's stage of development requires it. Children are then given opportunities to consolidate and deepen their learning by accessing the continuous provision.
We understand the importance of developing communication and language from an early age and we are passionate in supporting our children with developing skills to support their listening and attention, understanding and speaking. We provide a lending library service for your child to share a story at home. We carry out guided reading sessions to share the love of books in small groups and deliver specific carpet time sessions based on Phase 1 phonics.