EYFS Curriculum
This section contains information on the following:
Early Years Foundation Stage Framework
Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is how the Government and early years professionals describe the time in your child’s life between birth and age 5. For The Coppice this means children in our Nursery and Reception classes.
This is a very important stage as it helps your child get ready for main school as well as preparing them for their future learning and successes. From when your child is born up until the age of 5, their early years’ experience should be happy, active, exciting, fun and secure; and support their development, care and learning needs.
Nurseries, pre-schools, Reception classes and childminders registered to deliver the EYFS must follow a legal document called the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework.
The EYFS sets the standards that schools must meet to ensure that children learn and develop well and are kept healthy and safe. It promotes teaching and learning to ensure ‘school readiness’ and gives children the broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good progress through school and life.
The children are given opportunities to play and explore, to investigate and experience things and to ‘have a go’. They are active and develop their own ideas. They are all unique and will have different interests and abilities. The areas of development have been divided into two groups:
Three Prime Areas
- Communication and Language
- Physical Development
- 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 four specific areas:
- Literacy
- Mathematics
- Understanding the World
- Expressive Arts and Design
These seven areas are used to plan your child’s learning and activities according to their unique needs. This is a little bit like a curriculum in primary and secondary schools, but it's suitable for very young children, and it's designed to be really flexible so that staff can follow your child' needs and interests.
At the end of Reception the children will be assessed against the 17 Early Learning Goals (see link below) and their progress shared with parents.
Our Approach to Teaching and Learning in EYFS
At The Coppice Primary School and Nursery, we recognise and place great value on the development of children as individuals and providing them with the best possible foundation of knowledge, skills and understanding necessary for lifelong learning. It is our intent that our children acquire curiosity, knowledge, resilience, ambition and empathy. We want to ensure that they are given the best opportunities so that they become happy, confident and successful learners who are well prepared for the next phase of their education in Key Stage 1.
Throughout our EYFS at The Coppice Primary School and Nursery, we follow the Early Years Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage. This framework specifies the learning and development in the Early Years and provides prime and specific areas of learning we must cover in our curriculum. Our children are at the heart of our curriculum. The knowledge and concepts that are taught throughout our EYFS are relevant to our children and provide progression and essential links to later learning.
Our Early Years environments are enabling, with learning areas both indoors and outdoors filled with a rich array of open-ended and easily accessible resources. We have a good balance between adult-led and child-led activities and provide open-ended sustained play opportunities throughout the day that are both engaging and challenging. Learning experiences are all designed to support learning and to deepen knowledge in order that our children build firm foundations and connections that are needed for future learning.
For further information, please see our EYFS Policy below.
How the EYFS Underpins our Whole School Curriculum
The EYFS framework is structured differently to the national curriculum. Whilst the national curriculum is organised into subject areas, the EYFS framework is organised across seven areas of learning. However, the knowledge and skills taught in EYFS do feed into the national curriculum subjects.
The following document demonstrates how the early learning goals match up with the national curriculum statements.
At The Coppice, we have carefully considered how each of the topics we teach in Nursery and Reception will support children with their curriculum learning higher up the school. We have planned for whole-school knowledge progression and vocabulary building that starts in our early years foundation stage in an engaging and age-appropriate way e.g. through stories and role play with opportunities through continuous provision for children to further explore what has been taught.
Children's time in our EYFS underpins their knowledge journey with us and all has its place in our bigger picture. All of our KS1 teachers know, and can check, what knowledge and vocabulary the children have been previously taught and can check their prior knowledge before moving onto our KS1 topics in a thoughtful and skilful way. Our teachers are precise with their questioning to check what children remember and pitch content at exactly where the children are at.
Please see the following document for further detail of how our EYFS topics prepare our children for the next stage in their learning journey with us.
