Curriculum
IN THE FOUNDATION STAGE
The Nursery aims to foster the development of language skills; encourage listening and communication skills; intellectual development; physical development and fine manipulative skills; discriminating skills through observation and the use of all the senses; expression in imaginative, creative and exploratory play; security in being with a large group and facilitate a happy and smooth transition into school.
Your child’s learning in the Foundation Stage is based around play. Each activity involves talking and learning to use language to describe and explain. It leads to lively thinking and the development of your child as a person. They will have many experiences such as sharing books, baking, painting, modelling, music making, sand and water play, role play, gardening and visiting local places.
All these experiences help prepare the children for the more formal approach to maths and language, science and the creative arts in main school.
Your child’s progress and development in all these aspects is carefully monitored and recorded by the Foundation Stage staff.
IN MAIN SCHOOL
The curriculum is effectively what they do and learn in school. It is linked to our aims and programmes of work to help the children learn. All of our children have equal access to all aspects of the curriculum regardless of their sex or rate of learning.
Every day, the children experience at least one hour of focused learning in English and one hour daily in Mathematics. Having said this, our aims are not easily separated into subjects. One activity may include the learning of a variety of skills. At the heart of the curriculum is understanding and the use of language skills and mathematics. These areas cannot always be taught effectively in isolation, so a broad and rich programme of learning situations is devised by the staff so that the children have more experience to call upon, to question, to investigate to make observations and draw conclusions. Each half term a curriculum letter outlines the overview for that term’s learning for the children in their particular phase of school.
