Intent

At Cropthorne with Charlton CofE First School we place great value on the development of children as individuals. Providing them with the skills, knowledge and understanding, they need for the challenges in Key Stage One and beyond. Our aim is to build strong foundations, rooted in individual success through the love of learning, exploring, and through enriching their moral and spiritual development. To produce, curious, life-long learners.

We aim to…

• Provide a curriculum that offers children a wide range of opportunities ensuring that we do not expect children to aspire to things they have never encountered. We will work on broadening their experiences providing opportunities to try new things and encouraging them to relish a new challenge
• Provide high expectations encouraging them to develop perseverance and self-belief so that they can problem solve and achieve far more than they expected
• Provide an indoor and outdoor learning environment that helps children achieve their potential and support those who need additional help in order to maximise their chances of achieving the Early Learning Goals
• Provide children opportunities to develop their sense of wellbeing and ability to regulate their feelings so that they feel confident in our community and are equipped with all the tools they need to transition to Year 1 effectively
• Develop the skills and expertise of staff working in EYFS through regular and comprehensive professional development either run by the EYFS Lead or attending courses run by other providers
• To ensure that children access a broad and balanced curriculum that builds on their interests and nurtures and encourages a love of learning.

Implementation

Our curriculum follows the Early Years Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, supported by the Development Matters document. This document specifies the requirements for learning and development in the EYFS and provides the prime and specific areas of learning we must cover in our curriculum. Through our knowledge of each child and formative assessments the EYFS team plan exciting and engaging activities that will move the children’s learning forward. This may involve following a class theme where we take advantage of cross-curricular links in order to combine transferable skills and develop a wide-ranging vocabulary, which underpins the children’s learning. This may also include following individual children’s interests and making the most of those focused moments where the teaching and learning can be maximised in a one to one way with teacher and child. Each year creates its own unique blend of whole class, guided, adult directed play and child-initiated play activities dependent on the nature and needs of the class of individuals. 

Children in EYFS learn by playing and exploring, being active and thinking critically and creatively and this takes place both indoors and in our outdoor area. Our outdoor area is open all year round and in all but the most challenging weather conditions. Children make their own decisions about where they learn best and teachers ensure that there are opportunities for all areas of learning both inside and outside.

The school follows the Letter and Sounds phonic programme, using a wide range of physical and online resources to support this. Every child has access to a phonics session every day with intervention opportunities for those who find this area of learning more difficult.  We use the phonics session to also develop children’s expertise in handwriting. We teach pre cursive handwriting as appropriate over the year. We will be reviewing our provision for phonics this year in line with the newly accredited synthetic phonics programmes and will identify a new programme to follow for September 2022.

We provide effective and focused intervention for those children who are finding learning challenging and are not on track to meet expectations at the end of the year. This will be provided in an inclusive way and support from parents. They are included at an early stage to ensure that the children have every chance to achieve the Early Learning Goals.

The EYFS team collect evidence of children’s learning through work completed in their storybooks, literacy, maths, Jigsaw floor mat and handwriting books, observations, photos which are shared online on our class page and at parents evenings. A class letter is also sent home every week to keep parents updated in wat their child is learning. This means that parents can engage with children regularly about their learning and can contribute to the knowledge we have of the child in school.

Impact

We strive to ensure that our children’s progress across the EYFS curriculum is good from their varied starting points, that children reach the Early Learning Goals at the end of Reception and are at least in line with National Expectations. Class teachers use observations to make formative assessments, which inform planning and ensure that all children build on their current knowledge and skills at a good pace. We ensure that our children enter Key Stage 1 'school ready' with a love of learning and a broad range of knowledge and skills which provides them with the right foundation for future progress, enabling them to be a confident, independent, reflective, lifelong learners.