Our Curriculum
Within the group all children are supported in developing at their own pace. Each child is an individual and treated accordingly, our key worker system ensures a planned curriculum is tailored to each individual's needs.
We have a Step by Step booklet for each child in which we record and assess your child’s progress in the 6 areas of learning. These booklets are available to be looked at by parents on a Friday afternoon, during staff planning meetings, on an appointment basis.
We work to a variety of themes throughout the year and ask that you encourage your child to bring in items relevant to the theme for “Show and Tell” during the session.
The 6 areas of learning are as follows:
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
This
area of children’s development covers:
• Having a positive approach to learning and finding out about the
world around them;
• Having confidence in themselves and their ability to do things,
and valuing their own achievements;
• Being able to get on, work and make friendships with other people,
both children and adults;
• Becoming aware of - and being able to keep to - the rules which
we all need to help us to look after ourselves, other people and our environment;
• Being able to dress/undress themselves, and look after their personal
hygiene needs;
• Being able to expect to have their ways of doing things respected
and to respect other people’s ways of doing things.
Communication Language and Literacy
This area
of children’s development covers:
• Being able to use conversation with one other person, in small
groups and in large groups to talk with and listen to others; Adding to
their vocabulary by learning the meaning of - and being able to use -
new words;
• Being able to use words to describe their experiences;
• Getting to know the sounds and letters which make up the words
we use;
• Listening to - and talking about - stories;
• Knowing how to handle books and that they can be a source of stories
and information;
• Knowing the purposes for which we use writing,
• Making attempts at independent writing.
Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy
This area
of children’s development covers:
• Building up ideas about how many, how much, how far and how big;
• Building up ideas about patterns, the shape of objects and parts
of objects, and the amount of space taken up by objects;
• Starting to understand that numbers help us to answer questions
about how many, how much, how far and how big;
• Building up ideas about how to use counting to find out how many;
• Being introduced to finding the result of adding more or taking
away from the amount we already have.
Knowledge and Understanding the World
This area
of children’s development covers:
• Finding out about the natural world and how it works;
• Finding out about the made world and how it works;
• Learning how to choose - and use - the right tool for a task;
• Learning about computers, how to use them and what they can help
us to do;
• Starting to put together ideas about past and present and the
links between them;
• Beginning to learn about their locality and its special features;
• Learning about their own and other cultures.
Physical Development
This area of children’s
development covers:
• Gaining control over the large movements which we can make with
our arms, legs and bodies so that they can run, jump, hop, skip, roll,
climb, balance and lift;
• Gaining control over the small movements we can make with our
arms, wrists and hands, so that they can pick up and use objects, tools
and materials;
• Learning about the importance of - and how to look after - their
bodies.
Creative Development
This area of children’s
development covers:
• Using paint, materials, music, dance, words, stories and role-play
to express their ideas and feelings;
• Becoming interested in the way that paint, materials, music, dance,
words, stories and role-play can be used to express ideas and feelings.