LEARNING
What is the Early Years Foundation Stage
This is the statutory curriculum for all children aged between birth and five years old. At Little Bees we recognise that this is a very important stage as it helps your child get ready for school as well as preparing them for their future learning and successes.
We ensure that from when your child joins us until their final day that their early years experience is happy, active, exciting, fun and secure; and we support their development, care and learning needs.
How will my child be learning at Little Bees?
Your child will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge and demonstrating their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development.
The three prime areas of development are
Personal, social and emotional development
Making relationships: This is about children’s social development and how they interact with adults and other children and make friends.
Self-confidence and & Self-awareness: This is about children’s personal development and how they develop on understanding of themselves as an individual.
Managing feelings and behaviour: This is about children’s development and their growing understanding of feelings, emotions and empathy. It includes, for example, learning to behave appropriately in different environments, using behaviour goals to support children’s understanding, learning to wait rather than expecting instant gratifications, etc.
Physical development
Moving and Handling: This is about children’s fine (small) and gross (large) motor development including early mark making.
Health and Self-care: This is about how children learn to be healthy (hand washing, healthy eating, sleep, drinking, toileting, etc.) and stay safe (crossing roads, sun protection, stranger danger, etc.).
Communication and language development
Listening and Attention: This is about how children focus their attention and develop skills needed to concentrate. By school age, children need to be able to sit for a while and listen to what is going on around them, concentrating on a speaker.
Understanding: This is how interactions between adults and children help them to develop an understanding of language including asking and answering questions and following instruction.
Speaking: this is about children’s communication including their speech and language development, how they express themselves and use appropriate language.
The four specific areas of development are
Mathematical development
Numbers: This is about children’s understanding of numbers and calculations and their ability to solve problems.
Shape, Space and Measures: This is about children exploring a range of mathematical activities including time, money, space, distance, speed, weight, capacity, position, patterns, etc.
Literacy development
Reading: This is about children’s exposure to a wide range of books, rhymes, stories, role play with puppets, magazines, comics and other written documents.
Writing: This is about children’s developing phonic understanding which develops as they are exposed to the written words, and start to give meaning to the marks they make.
Understanding the World development
People and community: This is about how children learn about the people and communities in which they live and their growing understanding of diversity in the world around them.
The world: This is about living things (animals, plants, minibeasts, sea creatures), communities in the world around us and similarities and differences between the natural and man-made.
Technology
This is about children’s early exploration of technology to learn about cause and effect- buttons and flaps, remote controlled cars, etc. leading on to exploration of ITC-computers, cameras and digital media.