St John’s ｜Early Years

Our Early Years Curriculum

Intent
At St Johns we aim to deliver an outstanding Early Years curriculum, twinned with our Harmony curriculum and the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). We want to develop motivated children who strive to explore and understand God’s world, through stimulating and challenging play. Many of our children start their school journey having very limited cultural capital life; it is our aim to enhance our children’s experiences through: half-termly school trips linked to their interests and topic enabling them to grow a deeper understanding about their local and wider communities. Our aspiration is that children use of our Jolly John’s farm and discovery room to immerse themselves in experiences, which allow them to embed our school values and the key foundations of learning.

The EYFS is based on seven areas of learning.

There are three prime areas:

Personal, social and emotional development
Physical development
Communication and language

There are four specific areas:

Mathematics
Literacy
Understanding the world
Expressive arts and design

Implementation

Our children are nurtured in a secure environment, whilst being allowed to explore, enquire

and take risks both inside and outside the classroom. The children have opportunities to

engage in free-flow play as well as experiencing a wide variety of adult-led and child-initiated

activities. Teachers build on children’s knowledge and experiences, and provide opportunities

for progression, extension and challenge.

Each day every child within our early year’s provision takes part in an adult focus activity for both Phonics and Maths. The activities are varied and create interesting new experiences to stimulate learning alongside opportunities for children to revisit, practise or enjoy a sense of mastery or ‘can do’ attitudes.

Impact

Children make swift progress within a child centred context, and make a smooth transition to Key Stage 1. They flourish in their social, emotional and physical development, along with developing an excitement and love for learning and challenge.

Children are given opportunities to:

Talk and communicate in a widening range of situations, to respond to adults and each other, to listen carefully and to practise and extend their communication skills.
Explore words and texts in a vocabulary rich environment with a new story or traditional tale every day to enjoy, to decode and to read for pleasure.
Enjoy rhyme. Did you know that if children know eight nursery rhymes by the time they're four years old, they're usually among the best readers by the time they're eight? Rhyming helps children to break words down and to hear the sounds that make up words in preparation for reading and writing. So we sing songs and have a rhyme time with children every day.
Begin our structured Read Write Inc phonics teaching programme through a daily phonics and writing lesson
Encourage writing, discussion and storytelling in our role play areas and linked into the topics
we are studying and our Harmony curriculum, using the Write Way approach to teaching writing techniques.

Results

Discover 'Tapestry'

To keep parents up to date with their child’s learning, every parent is given a login to their child’s online learning Journal called Tapestry. Through this site, teachers will upload observations, which link to the above areas of learning. Once uploaded, parents can view the written comments, photos and videos of the children’s learning. Parents can also upload videos, photos and comments to add to the children’s learning journal.

Current Themes of Study:

Tapestry

Please see your child's class teacher for parent access.

St John's

Church of England

Primary & Nursery School

an academy in The Good Shepherd Trust

Our Early Years Curriculum

Results