Our curriculum & ethos

Explaining our Curriculum

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Over the last year it has been an important step for nurseries to develop their own curriculum.

While schools offer a subject based curriculum the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) asks us to plan for children’s learning, development and care. Therefore we must include:

1.) 7 areas of learning:

• • • Communication and Language

    • Personal, Social and Emotional Development

    • Physical development

    • Literacy

    • Mathematics

    • Understanding the World

    • Expressive Arts and Design

2.) The overarching principles which are often expressed as:

The unique child + positive relationships + enabling environments = learning and development

3.) In planning and teaching we must reflect on the different rates at which children learn and adjust our practice. The characteristics of effective teaching and learning (COETL) are:

Playing and exploring

Active Learning

Creating and thinking critically

4.) The statutory safeguarding and welfare requirements.

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5.) Finally we must also consider each child’s interests when planning and respond to their individual needs. To this end we have written our own curriculum which is based on our ethos set out below. You will therefore see a difference when you next receive Childrens progress checks.

The Little School Ethos

We aim to prioritise the health, nutrition and well being of all our children.

We do this by :

Spending lots of time outside in our Forest School and gardens, having plenty of exercise, practising good hygiene and looking after our wellbeing.

Growing our own fruit and vegetables, learning about different foods and a healthy diet.

  Learning about our emotions through our Happy Minds practice so that children are better equipped to succeed in life.

Our priorities in delivering our curriculum are:

Tolerance of each other, our differences, values and heritage.

Resilience, instilling it into every child to keep going, having high expectations.

Unique - recognising that every child is an individual with their own interests and desires.

Creative - delivering a curriculum rich in music, art, awe and wonder.

Knowledgeable - providing experiences that give children the information they need to build future success

Engaged - children show strong engagement and are supported to make good progress across all areas of learning.

Relationships - children learn to make strong relationships, collaborating, learning to resolve conflict and showing respect to teachers and peers.