Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
At Wessington Primary School, our Foundation Stage team are passionate about providing a joyful and stimulating environment in which children feel safe to explore their own interests, build relationships with others and embark on their own, individual school journey. We enjoy planning engaging activities that open our children’s eyes to the world around them and encourage them to become the best learners they can be. Through a mix of ‘teacher-led’ input and ‘pupil-initiated’ learning, we ensure children can participate in enquiry, discovery and reflection in both the indoor and outdoor learning areas.
As a school, we are proud to offer wonderful opportunities that develop the whole-child and this very much starts in the EYFS. Through Forest School sessions, Lea Green activity days and a range of opportunities to enhance learning, we aim to build resilient, confident and motivated learners. We also value the ideas and opinions of our children and we encourage them to listen to and consider other people’s points of view. We give children the opportunity to negotiate, problem solve and communicate with their peers so they can deal with real life situations calmly and thoughtfully.
In the EYFS, we love sharing rhymes, stories and books. When we read together, we get to visit exciting places, meet diverse characters and learn interesting new vocabulary. It is a privilege to observe our children as they take all these new experiences into their play and learning. As EYFS staff, we understand that we can help children to foster a lifelong love of reading and we have lots of exciting ways to inspire and engage our young readers.
We know that each child is individual with their own strengths, interests and opinions and we celebrate that. Our aim is that by the time our children leave the EYFS provision, they will be happy, independent and motivated learners who are capable of tackling challenges, building relationships and being successful.
EYFS at Wessington Primary School:
- Teachers have high expectations of children in the early years and learning opportunities are well planned, based on regular and accurate assessment of achievement so that every child is suitably challenged.
- Planning is based on 'child initiated learning' that has proved very effective.
- Children are highly motivated, enjoy learning, have good relationships with their peers and are self-motivated to learn.
- The vibrant indoor and outdoor environment provides imaginative, varied and stimulating continuous provision to enhance child initiated learning, which promotes their imagination and curiosity.
- Children investigate learning opportunities during choosing time and engage full, being always keen to 'have a go' with sensitive encouragement from adults to explore all areas.
- Teachers respond to children's interests, amend planning to meet these, with assessments sharply focused to include all who are involved in each child's development.
- Teachers monitor the progress of each child, set challenging targets to ensure they meet the Early Learning Goals in all areas of learning.
- Children enjoy sharing their achievements, ask questions to further their knowledge and can talk enthusiastically about the next steps in their learning.
EYFS Policy
