EARLY YEARS FOUNDATION STAGE

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is the statutory Early Years guidance. This is mandatory for all schools, settings, and childminders to follow from birth up to the end of reception. The EYFS sets out our legal obligations regarding things like adult: child ratios, suitable people, safeguarding and welfare, staff qualifications, and learning and development in the 7 areas of learning: Communication & Language, Personal Social & Emotional development, Physical development, Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding of the World and Expressive Arts & Design.

We use the Development Matters curriculum to guide our activities and learning opportunities and in pre-school, we focus on supporting children to develop the early skills that set them up to make progress. For example, we provide activities to
build on the children’s gross and fine motor skills, mark making, excitement for learning, conversation skills, interest in books and
print, and a strong sense of self , which will eventually lead to mastery of reading, writing and all of the other fantastic things  children will learn as they grow and develop.

All of the learning we do here,  is through quality, active play and includes adult interactions with children during planned and
child-initiated play and activities. communicating and modelling language, showing, explaining, demonstrating, exploring ideas,
encouraging, questioning, recalling, providing a narrative for what they are doing, facilitating, and setting challenges.