How and What do we Learn?

As an early years setting we plan topics for each term but our learning follows the children’s interests and play. Our current topic is called ‘All about me!’, but does not focus on just the children: it can be likes/dislikes, families, homes, favourite food and toys, to name just a few areas of learning.

We use Development Matters as our curriculum guidance. Activities are planned for the children but are adapted quickly to suit interests. Children frequently bring in ‘findings’ from home or from their walk to school that morning, so our curriculum can quickly change from painting portraits to learning about wild bird egg shells or seasonal flowers.

There are seven areas of learning in the Early Years curriculum. There are three prime areas of learning: these are Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED) Communication and Language (CL) and Physical development (PD. There are four specific areas of learning: Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding of the World and Expressive Arts and Design. All children have a main focus on the prime areas of learning throughout their preschool years, but when the children are in the year before they start school they develop their learning by including the specific areas of learning too. However all activities are available to all children and if they want to they can repeat an activity a number of times!

As the Preschool is part of the school, we follow the same schemes of learning. Early Years and Key Stage One learn phonics through Little Wandle Phonics, a systematic way of teaching children phonics. In Preschool we learn the foundational skills that will support our phonics learning in the future. Phonics is all about listening, so in Mini Morgan's we learn to listen to nursery rhymes, environmental sounds, rhythms and rhymes and we hear the initial sounds in familiar words.  In the summer term of pre-school the children will also be introduced to oral segmenting and blending skills, which involves breaking down words into their separate parts, e.g. 'big' is made from the sounds /b/, /i/ and /g/!

The children are also encouraged to learn how to write names. 

We capture our learning through the school’s online Seesaw app, keeping parents informed of what we do with photos and videos celebrating their learning and progress.

Our staff provide encouragement to all the children in the setting, focusing on where our children’s interests are and their next steps. We offer engaging activities to inspire them to learn and which promote their development and independence, including roleplay, sensory, fine motor and creative activities to get 'stuck in' to!