EYFS Curriculum Intent
At Oak Hill C of E Primary School, our EYFS curriculum is designed to ensure that all children develop a love for learning, build foundational skills and become confident, curious and independent learners.
Our intent is aligned with our school vision “In Love, we Learn, Flourish and Grow”, ensuring that every child:
Learns: Develops a solid foundation of knowledge and skills to succeed in future learning.
Grows: Becomes confident in their ability to explore, experiment and engage in the learning process with a sense of wonder and curiosity.
Flourishes: Demonstrates personal growth, social development and emotional resilience, as well as a sense of belonging to the wider community.
Our Early Years Curriculum is based around 4 guiding principles:
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The Unique Child – We tailor our approach to the individual needs, interests and cultural backgrounds of each child.
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Positive Relationships- Children learn to be strong and independent through positive relationships with trusted adults. We also recognise the importance of strong school and home links to ensure continuity and development.
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Enabling Environments – Children will have access to engaging environments that respond to their individual needs and foster academic and personal growth.
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Strong Social and Emotional Development- We promote well-being, emotional regulation, empathy and positive relationships in order to support resilience and learning.
EYFS Curriculum Implementation
Our curriculum is a carefully designed blend of play-based learning, structured activities and rich interactions with the environment and community. The EYFS Framework’s seven areas of learning and development underpin our approach.
3 Prime Areas
- Communication and Language
We ensure that we develop quality opportunities for speaking and listening through structured activities, group discussions, targeted questioning, quality texts and role play scenarios. We encourage storytelling, singing and poetry to develop vocabulary, comprehension and confidence. At Oak Hill, our EYFS children benefit from being in a mixed age class so they are immersed into a language rich environment right from day one.
- Personal, Social and Emotional Development
We pride ourselves on being a THRIVE based school who believe that children need to feel safe and happy before they can learn. We do this through a nurturing environment where secure relationships are built between children and adults. The children are supported to self-regulate their emotions through daily routines and group activities. We encourage children to express their feelings and guide them to solve conflicts independently.
- Physical Development
At Oak Hill, children in the EYFS have lots of opportunities for physical activity both indoors and outdoors, with carefully designed activities to develop fine and gross motor skills. We provide children with opportunities such as balanceability, a wide and varied PE curriculum and opportunities for independent play that develops motor skills in the outdoor area. In the indoor provision areas, children are able to develop fine motor skills through activities such as cutting, threading and play doh.
4 Specific Areas
- Literacy
We believe that quality, planned story times allow children to spend time together enjoying a books. This includes purposeful questioning and valuable discussions around texts. We encourage children to ask questions about new language and predict what might next, helping them to make sense of the stories they hear. We also use our environment and provision to allow children access to high quality texts and new vocabulary.
At Oak Hill, we use the government validated systematic synthetic phonics programme ‘Little Wandle: Letters and Sounds Revised’. This programme ensures children build on their growing knowledge from Reception up to Year 2. This starts with recognition of individual letters, moving on to digraphs (two letters that make one sound). Children are also taught tricky words (words that follow no phonetic pattern). They learn the skill of segmenting and blending, meaning they are able to access reading books that match the sounds they learn.
Early writing is encouraged using a high quality text approach, which ensures that children are exposed to a range of different texts. This enables them to develop their own story telling and writing throughout the early years.
In Reception, children have ‘Drawing Club’ sessions four times a week, where they use high quality texts as the inspirations for their own drawings and writing. Our environment encourages children to engage in mark making and writing during independent play.
- Mathematics
In Reception we focus on building a strong foundation in number recognition, counting and basic problem solving skills. The children are encouraged to have a growth mind set towards Maths and to embrace ‘marvellous mistakes’. Where possible, we incorporate real world contexts for Maths to encourage children to make connections with their wider experiences.
These firm foundations ensure that children will move up to Year 1 with fluency and confidence in Maths.
- Understanding the World
We believe that experience is the best way to gain knowledge about the world in Early Years. We welcome visitors to the school and regularly take the children on outings in the local areas. We believe that experiences are invaluable in ensuring that children have a good understanding of the world around them.
We also use play to follow children’s natural lines of enquiry and explore any questions that they might raise about the world around them.
- Expressive arts and design
At Oak Hill we provide a number of creative outlets for children to express themselves through art, music, dance and drama. We have creative spaces in both our indoor and outdoor provision, including a stage and an art area with high quality resources such as water colour paints and sketching pencils. We believe that it is important for children to have a range of expressive outlets. The children have access to musical instruments in their provision.
Whole school planning
Children in the EYFS at Oak Hill access a unique curriculum however, we recognise that these are the foundations of all learning that will happen throughout the school. Therefore, the EYFS curriculum is included in all of our progression maps across the curriculum. This is to ensure that there is a clear picture of where children progress from Reception.
We feel that the children are very fortunate to be in a mixed age class, where they are able to challenge themselves and extend their learning further. This means that they are able to share some of their lessons surrounding their topics with the Year 1s and the Year 2s. During these lessons, we still focus on the areas of the EYFS framework.
Planning for Provision
- ‘Teachable moments’ based upon understanding of individual need
- Targeted reading with individual children
- Strong communication with parents/carers
- Strong relationships between adults and children
Working in Partnership with Parents
At Oak Hill we work closely with our parents, respecting and valuing their home learning experiences. We use Class Dojo to communicate with parents and we share home and school achievements on this platform. We share information this way, such as topic webs and home learning tasks.
EYFS Curriculum Impact
Everything we do in our EYFS setting is to make sure that children are happy, confident and have a love of learning. We will see from assessment and the baseline that children have made good progress. We endeavour to see children who have barriers to learning removed and are enthusiastic and curious. Children will ask questions of the world around them and enjoy exploring their own ideas. Children will love stories and will be confident, excellent communicators.
EYFS Documents
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EYFS Progression of Skills | [pdf 510KB] |
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Early Years Foundation Stage at Oak Hill C of E Primary School | [pdf 177KB] |
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Early Learning Goals overview | [pdf 1MB] |
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