The curriculum is everything we want the children to learn and experience while they are with us in preschool.

Essentially, the curriculum provides the new skills and new knowledge that we intend the children to gain during their time with us, and take with them on their onward journey to primary school.

Our Intent

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) sets standards for the learning, development and care of your child from birth to 5 years old, and we have followed these principles when designing our curriculum.  Further information on EYFS can be found in ‘What to expect in the Early Years Foundation Stage: A Guide for Parents’.

What we want the children to learn and how we support this to happen, has been designed to reflect the unique character of our setting and our children, and at the heart of our curriculum intent, are the 10 Curriculum Goals . . .

 

Confident communicators

To become a confident communicator who can listen carefully in different situations, speak with friends and adults, ask questions, ask for help and use new vocabulary to explain ideas and feelings.

Fantastic Friends

To become a fantastic friend who can be kind, caring and helpful, show empathy and respect to others, play co-operatively, share and negotiate whilst considering others’ ideas and feelings.

Independent Individuals

To become an independent individual who can follow the Preschool rules, have simple goals and persevere to achieve them and select resources. Manage their own personal needs, look after belongings, toileting, and manage dressing, undressing and shoes.

Feelings Fanatics

To become a feelings fanatic, who can recognise, name and start to regulate their feelings, and begin to empathise with the feelings and needs of others. To talk about and describe their feelings and emotions, and begin to use strategies to calm or regulate their own feelings and emotions.

Exceptional Explorers

To become an Exceptional Explorer who can show curiosity about the world around them such as growing, life cycles and community and talk about what they see, using a wide vocabulary. Explore how things work, and why things happen, have “ I wonder . . .” thinking.

Brilliant Bookworms

To become a brilliant bookworm who can show a love for stories, illustrations and books, use new vocabulary to talk about what has been read to them.

Masters of Maths

To become a Maths Master! who has a deep understanding of the ‘fiveness’, who can notice and then recognise shapes and numbers in the environment and enjoys using shapes and numbers in play. Begin to compare quantities, notice simple patterns, count to and objects to 10.

‘Wow’ Writers

To become a Wow Writer, who enjoys making marks with a range of media in fun ways. Make marks for a reason like, ticking off a shopping list, marking children on a register. Wanting and enjoying forming letters of their own name.

Phoneme Fiends

To become phoneme fiends who enjoy listening to letter sounds. Children begin to hear, identify distinguish, articulate, and blend words and sounds.

Proud performers

To become a proud performer, who enjoys singing songs and nursery rhymes, dancing, acting out stories and exploring musical instruments. Build confidence to perform for an audience in our preschool plays, sports days and musical events.

 

To achieve these goals, children must experience lots of smaller blocks of learning, achieving the bigger goals requires lots of strands of children’s learning and development coming together. As you can imagine, each goal requires lots and lots of individual learning experiences and activities, as well as lots of repetition and variation to really make sure that learning takes place.

We support children individually to make their own progress through the milestones on the journey to each goal. We recognise that what we consider strong progress may look different for each child, but all children will be progressing through the same curriculum; all children will be on the same journey.