Intent At The Village Nursery Bellingdon we intend that our ambitious and inclusive curriculum educates all the children in knowledge, skills and understanding, to be effective, inquisitive, curious, independent learners and influence their wider thinking across all areas of the curriculum. We endeavour to give the children the Cultural Capital they need for future success thus giving each child the best start in life and the support that enables them to fulfil their full potential and achieve future success. We are passionate about creating opportunities for children to communicate more easily through developing language and communication skills. Fundamental British Values are at the heart of our curriculum and everything we do. We promote the more general concepts within the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and understand that the children’s development within these areas is key to promoting the values in the long term. It is our intention that children experience the seven areas of learning through play-based learning. This is through the children’s interests, topics, themes, continuous provision activities, and phonics. Learning is carefully planned by the staff to support all areas of learning: communication and language development, personal, social and emotional development, physical development, literacy, mathematics, understanding of the world and expressive arts and design. Our curriculum aims to enable all children to become: Competent and creative learners who are curious about the world around them. Secure and confident individuals who enjoy coming to nursery, learning new skills and building on their existing learning. Skillful communicators who can connect with others through language and play, ensuring that they play in a vocabulary rich environment. We dedicate time to focus on health and self-care. We share a range of healthy snacks, learn about the importance of a healthy balanced diet and develop an understanding of taking care of our teeth.
Implementation At The Village Nursery Bellingdon, we encourage children to demonstrate their attitudes and behaviours to learning through the Characteristics of Effective Learning. The Characteristics of effective learning include: Playing and exploring - Practitioners encourage a ‘can do’ attitude so children are willing to take a risk in new experiences. They encourage curiosity and independent exploration, extend children’s learning, develop children’s language, feed in new vocabulary and challenge children’s thinking. We aim to ensure children are confident to try out new ideas and are not afraid to ‘have a go’. Active learning – This is not about being physically active. In effective active learning, children maintain their attention for a period of time and are not easily distracted because they are interested and fascinated by the activity. Creating and thinking critically - Practitioners help children to develop so that they make connections in their learning, make predictions and can think things through. Children will learn to apply skills in different context and consider the best way of completing a task without waiting to be directed. Children are encouraged to be thinkers who make sense of their experiences by using what they already know to learn new things, linking information as concepts are developed and linked together, finding meaning in sequence and cause and effect. Children are encouraged to give their own explanations about how they solve a problem learn more than when they receive positive feedback and/or explanation of their errors; therefore, young children watching and learning from older children benefits both. Our curriculum is designed to recognise children’s prior learning by providing first-hand learning experiences and allowing them to develop interpersonal skills, build resilience and become creative, critical thinkers to enable them to challenge themselves. We ensure the content of the curriculum is differentiated to meet the needs of all learners and is taught in a logical progression so that children build on prior learning. Our approach to ‘in the moment’ planning allows us to continually adapt our provision to accommodate the changing needs and interests of the children. We understand to maintain high standards of quality first teaching we must invest in our staff by providing high quality Continued Professional Development (CPD) to match the current needs of the staff and to match the needs of our children. Staff at The Village Nursery Bellingdon create an environment to match the needs and skill levels of our children and use their own assessments and to inform their planning and the quality provision. We recognise that language and communication are vital in all areas of a child’s development. We welcome children from culturally diverse backgrounds and some of our children are at an early stage of learning English as an additional language (EAL). Communication and language development are therefore a consistent focus. We support children’s development by providing a rich language environment, where conversations, singing and sharing stories form a regular part of each child’s day. We have ‘core books’ which we read frequently with the children. These books are the type of books that can be re-visited again and again on different levels to support language development. The idea is that children will develop language and increase vocabulary in addition to gaining a love of books and will become very familiar with these known texts so that they can remember and re-tell them. Our core books are: Where’s Spot, Dear Zoo, You choose, Brown Bear Brown Bear, We’re going on a bear hunt, Jasper’s Beanstalk, Very Hungry Caterpillar, Hairy McClary from Donaldson Dairy, Each peach pear plum, Hug, The train ride, Come on Daisy and Owl Babies. We also have ‘core rhymes’ which support language development. Children chant or sing the rhymes at group and carpet times. By the time the children leave nursery they are familiar with each core rhyme. Our core rhymes are: Twinkle, twinkle little star, Hickory dickory dock, Jack and Jill, Hey diddle diddle, Humpty dumpty, Incy wincy spider, Baa Baa black sheep, Mary Mary quite contrary, I’m a little tea pot, Tommy thumb, 12345 once I caught a fish alive, I have ten little fingers, Wind the bobbin up. We believe learning through play is vital, we use the environment to ensure the children’s needs are met through continuous provision, enhanced provision and following their interests. Staff teach an objective through their whole group, small group teaching and going into provision to observe children’s play and move learning forward at that point. They record ‘snapshot’ evidence of children’s learning to build an overall picture and set next steps for learning. Formative assessment takes place within every session and helps staff to identify any children that needs more support to achieve the objective and those that need challenging. This may be instantaneous if appropriate. Children are in cohort groups according to age and in small ‘keyworker’ groups within their cohort group. By teaching we do not mean a formal approach to teaching as would be applied in schools beyond Reception. The term teaching covers a wide range of interactions between adults and children which encourage children’s development and their cultural capital. The interactions will take place during both child initiated and adult led activities and will include: communicating and modelling language, showing, explaining, demonstrating, exploring ideas, encouraging, questioning, recalling, providing a narrative, facilitating and setting challenges. It takes account of the equipment and resources adults provide, the physical environment and the structure of the day or session. Practitioners need to take into account the children’s interests, an assessment of their development and ensure that planning takes into account children’s next steps.
Impact At The Village Nursery Bellingdon we believe ‘happy children learn’ and the enjoyment of the curriculum promotes achievement, confidence and good behaviour. Our children feel safe to try new things. We believe that every child is capable, competent and has great potential. The broad and balanced curriculum design ensures that the needs of individual children including EAL, SEND and disadvantaged, and small groups of children can be met within the environment of high quality first teaching supported by targeted interventions where appropriate. In this way it can be seen to be impacting in a very positive way on pupil outcomes. We endeavour for pupils to be Reception ready. We consistently receive positive feedback from feeder schools and parents about how our children are 'school ready' when they make the transition to primary school. The impact of our curriculum will be measured by how effectively it helps our pupils develop into well rounded individuals who embody our values and carry with them the knowledge, skills and attitudes which will make them lifelong learners and valuable future citizens.