Early Years and Foundation Stage at Little Acorns
At Little Acorns, we want the children to have the best opportunity to settle in and to thrive in our care, spiritually, morally, socially, and culturally. When children are happy and settled, they can develop the characteristics of effective learning, learn in the best way possible and achieve well.
Children learn best when they are engaged in quality play based activities and tasks, both indoors and outside. They can develop the skills and attitudes of effective learning when they can make decisions and solve problems during self-initiated tasks, tasks that they have decided to do. This empowers them to make choices, to persevere and develop ‘stick-ability’. An enabling environment creates spaces and opportunities for children to do this, sometimes through structured and prepared play but mostly through independent and self-initiated play.
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The Early Years and Foundation Stage framework sets standards for the learning, development and care of children from birth to 5 years old in their journey towards the early learning goals. It organises the curriculum into 7 learning areas.
The Prime areas form a key assessment focus as these area impact on a child’s readiness to learn. Combined with the characteristics of effective learning the whole child and their approach to learning can be assessed fully.
A child’s personal, social and emotional development is fundamental to their relationships, ability to make and sustain friends, their ability to recognise and manage their feelings, their behaviour choices, and how this impacts on their confidence and their self-esteem. Children need to build emotional resilience, know when they need help and when they don’t, and how to ask for help.
Physical development provides opportunities for children to develop their moving and handling skills, as well as their health and their ability to manage their own physical and personal needs.
Communication and language impacts on their ability to communicate their own ideas through spoken word as well as their ability to listen and pay full attention to those around them and understand the need to give and receive instructions and ask questions. Key when developing curiosity and making sense of the world around you for the first time.
Communication and language impacts on their ability to communicate their own ideas through spoken word as well as their ability to listen and pay full attention to those around them and understand the need to give and receive instructions and ask questions. Key when developing curiosity and making sense of the world around you for the first time.
In addition to these areas the focus is on how children learn, the Characteristics of Learning, and how effective their learning style is.
Playing and Exploring: Children need a huge variety of opportunities to investigate, broaden their experiences and ‘have a go’. Relevant and context base opportunities like role play, dressing up, pretend and small world, wilderness play, reflection and immersion enable them to act out experiences and practice the language that goes with each role. This is sometimes referred to as imaginative learning or ‘mantle of the expert’. They learn to explore, delve, ask curious questions, practice and rehearse, discover and deepen their understanding of processes and their world, find out about people, places, time, animals and plants with a real interest, curiosity and understanding.
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Active Learning: When children are actively engaged in what they are doing and really interested they can persevere and ‘stay on task’. This happens when the opportunities are matched perhaps by theme or interest, or perhaps the environment allows the child to be ‘lost in learning’. A concrete or real experience can grasp children’s imagination in a very exciting way, to the point where the child is so immersed, they are transported to another place or time. When children are really engaged fully they become confident and able to try different ways of doing something without giving up when things don’t go quite according to plan!
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Creative and Thinking Critically: Children need the opportunity to have their own ideas and to develop these through careful planning, or problem solving. They might think about ways of joining different parts of a model or work out the best materials to use when they make a boat, an umbrella or a bird table perhaps. They might think about how to change the shape of a natural or rigid material to make it into something useful, or beautiful. They might invent something that gives shelter from the sun, wind or rain, work out how to prepare for some cooking or a party, prepare a shopping list, manage some money then shop!
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They might decide how best to grow and look after some seeds, and how to harvest some vegetables for cooking. They might use their understanding of number, shapes and colours to sort some items and calculate what they have, what they have used or what they need. They might use their skill of matching to play a game. They might use their ability to measure and compare to help them find the fastest car, the largest leaf, the longest ribbon or the heaviest stone, the largest envelope or the shortest worm!
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These characteristics and learning areas form the skills, knowledge and experiences that enable children from birth to 5 years old to develop as learners.
The Specific Areas (Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and design) help to complete and broaden the curriculum and are combined in a cross curricular way to form exciting and relevant themes to the tasks and opportunities as described above. At Little Acorns the themes are planned over the year to draw in festivals, celebrations, seasons and planned transition events too. These act as a stimulus to learning but at the same time we plan carefully for each child’s needs and next steps, as well as taking their interests and decision making into consideration, allowing children to lead the learning.
Treasure Basket
To keep children’s interest, to nurture inquisitive, investigative behaviour and curiosity, we use Treasure Baskets. They encourage children to explore unusual and different things, a theme, or a focus, or a schema and lead to new discoveries. All you need is a lovely basket, round is best as they can approach from any side, but it doesn’t matter that much. Then have fun filling it with odd things, try… ‘sense of smell’, ‘light and heavy’, ‘feel this’, sparkle and shine’, ‘sense of time’, ‘sound of music’, ‘light and colour’, ‘rainbows’, ‘rolling along’, ‘the bathroom basket’, ‘will it float?’, ‘Easter’, ‘spring time’, ‘magnetic’, ‘brushes’. |
These are just ideas, but use what you have or can find—different spoons, wooden items, shells etc. Children will enjoy looking at and handling different textures, sounds, shapes, colours and smells. If your little ones are little and like to put things in their mouth, don’t have dangerous or sharp items that they can chew or swallow. Ideally if an adult can be on hand that is great, but if you can’t then choose safe things that can be looked at independently according to age.
What is a Schema?
Schemas are usually described as repeated patterns of behaviour, that we see when watching children play and investigate their surroundings. They can be referred to as their ‘interests’ too, and it shows how children learn and make sense of their world.
Schemas are usually described as repeated patterns of behaviour, that we see when watching children play and investigate their surroundings. They can be referred to as their ‘interests’ too, and it shows how children learn and make sense of their world.
Some schemas you might see include:
- Transporting: carrying toys from one place to another in a truck, pram, bag, purse, box, wheelbarrow or hands
- Positioning: choosing to line /position /sit themselves/toys very carefully, cars, people, animals, dinosaurs, bricks, sorting and separating, being very specific, correcting,
- Orientation: looking at things from different angles using binoculars, magnifiers, lenses, kaleidoscopes, lying down to draw
- Enclosure: making fences and borders, with bricks, blocks, crates, paints, cutting, sticking, chalks, paper
- Enveloping: or wrapping, toys and themselves in material, paper, scarves, play silks, dressing up clothes, envelopes
- Rotation: keys, knobs, buttons, wheels, taps, cogs, seeing how they work, cars, trucks, rolling, rolling toys and parts
- Transforming: mixing paint, mud pies, mixing sand and water, interest in how ice melts and freezes
- Containing: climbing into boxes, filing boxes, pockets, containers, prams, buckets, handbags, suitcases, trucks, wheelbarrows
- Connecting: joining with glue string, duplo, waffle, stickle, mega bricks, tape,
- Trajectory: dropping food/bowl/cups from highchair, swinging, kicking balls, throwing toys/items, pulling out tissues, running backwards and forwards, building/knocking down towers
- Going through a boundary: threading beads, crawling in tunnels, posting, weaving, latching, locking, doors, sieving
- Core and radial: drawing circles and lines, sunshine, making birthday cakes with candles/hedgehogs/dragons in dough/clay
The provision would be concrete, integrated, cross curricular tasks and opportunities. The play would be a mixture of child independent play and adult led play but built in opportunities for the adult to play alongside the child, to extend or deepen the play and to create opportunities for language and communication skills to be developed. Language and communication skills, as with other areas of learning, do not develop in isolation or on demand but through quality play based and concrete experiences that fully engage the child and take them from the known to the unknown.
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Perhaps through construction, role play, pretend, mantle of the expert, real life experiences, props and provocations various forms of expression, small world play, creative curriculum/framework opportunities to encourage the children to create scenarios, scenes, adventure, open ended thinking, problem solving, (nest building, cardboard village, cardboard trays, story props in baskets, dough and small world, treasure baskets, activity trays).
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We will have high expectations but also ensure that the children enjoy success, by knowing their starting points and by planning individually to meet their next steps. Working closely with parents to develop personalised learning that is fun, exciting, and relevant, engaging, challenging, creative and imaginative.
Children will be encouraged to engage, develop, innovate and express through a whole range of different media- mark making, painting, making, constructing, dancing, singing, building, cooking, pretending, inventing, self-initiating. |
We work with the Framework to identify when and how children are meeting their checkpoints, and combine this with our preferred guidance, Birth To 5 Matters. Closely observing the children, we record what we see them do, hear them say, watch them discover and try. The Impact. This allows us to plan for individual children, deciding what they could be doing next. Our Intention, and how we are going to achieve this. The Implementation. We then return to the observations and begin the planning cycle again. The checkpoints are in line with the 2-year check, and so these will appear in a 2 year check written for your child’s development meeting.
Date: July 2023
Signed: AOkane Date: 31.7.23
Signed: MOKane Date: 31.7.23
Signed: AOkane Date: 31.7.23
Signed: MOKane Date: 31.7.23