EYFS Intent Statement
At Henry Chadwick we believe in creating a safe and stimulating Early Years environment where children begin their journey to becoming lifelong learners.
We strongly believe that every child deserves the best possible start in life. We pride ourselves on the warm, trusting relationships we establish, recognising the needs of the children in our care and nurturing individual’s talents, enabling the children to grow and develop with confidence whilst ensuring their well-being.
We understand the importance of practical learning experiences, building knowledge and skills to promote academic achievement and promoting our schools learning super powers- teamwork, communication, empathy, resilience and determination.
We strive to equip children with a love of learning and a natural curiosity through supportive, skilful interactions with practitioners and fun, fascinating and engaging provision. To supplement our high-quality teaching, we also offer specialist music teachers and our own forest school experiences ensuring an inspirational and holistic approach that is tailored to the needs of our pupils.
In Early Years, children begin to develop their phonics knowledge as they begin their reading journey. We use a synthetic phonics programme called Read, Write Inc where children are introduced to 44 common sounds and how to blend, read and spell them. They are able to access a range of books matched to the phonics sounds that are changed weekly, which they take home to share with parents/carers. Teachers share a variety of books, which expose the children to rich language, themes and develop their knowledge of the world.
EYFS Writing
In the Early Years Foundation Stage writing is a crucial part of our curriculum and all children are provided with many opportunities to develop and apply their writing skills across the curriculum in a variety of ways. Early writing is encouraged through mark making opportunities in role play areas (both indoors and outdoors), construction areas and we have designated writing areas where this enthusiasm to writing can be encouraged.
We recognise that all writing has a clear purpose and as such, we endeavour to ensure children are confident in their understanding of audience, purpose and context through exposure to a range of text types i.e. stories, recounts, diaries, letters. Our curriculum enables children to explore such genres, understand their specific features and presentation styles and have opportunities to write for different purposes using different text types as inspiration.
In teaching for mastery, our Early Years setting provides time and opportunities for children to make connections in their mathematical understanding. They are therefore provided with many opportunities throughout the indoor and outdoor environments to develop and deepen their understanding through play as well as teacher-led sessions. Practitioners provide different contexts for children to explore the same mathematical idea and multiple representations of this idea (including pictorial, informal jottings and mathematics equipment). For mastery in early years, children are encouraged to communicate their mathematical thinking in a wide variety of ways including through manipulation of resources, gesture, pointing, body language, mark-making and talk.
Our wider curriculum is taught through the learning and development areas of; ‘Understanding of the World’ and ‘Expressive Arts and Design’. Exciting, purposeful and contextual activities are planned to build on children’s natural curiosity. For example, trying to get a dinosaur out of a frozen egg, enables them to think like a ‘Scientist’ and ‘Engineer’ as they explore a range of materials and test out their own ideas. Building further on our Communication and Language focus, children will be encouraged to employ subject specific language and terminology, and such vocabulary will be modelled, both verbally and orally, by supporting practitioners.