Supporting your child’s development, care and learning needs

Learning

The Early Years Foundation Stage

The early years foundation stage (EYFS) sets standards for the learning, development, and care of your child from birth to five years old. Your child’s early years’ experience should be happy, active, exciting, fun, and secure; and support their development, care, and learning needs.

Your child will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge, and demonstrating their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development. The three prime areas are:

Communication and language

Physical development

Personal, social, and emotional development

These prime areas are most essential for your child’s healthy development and future learning.

As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in 4 specific areas. These are:

Literacy

Mathematics

Understanding the world

Expressive arts and design

These 7 areas are used to plan your child’s learning and activities.  We believe in a child-centred approach to our curriculum. We work diligently to create highly engaging, enabling environments. We are passionate to ensure that our Pre-School is a wonderous place for our children to experience awe and beauty through nature and authentic opportunities. We are a pre-school without most conventional toys, meaning we use authentic real items, loose parts, and nature through the seasons.

We view young children as curious individuals who have an innate powerful ability to see the potential world which surrounds them.

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We have a combined early years
experience of 83 years

Enhancing children's early learning

Our approach

The approaches and experiences we offer to enhance children’s early learning and education include a mix of the following:
    • In the Moment Planning and Learning through Play
    • Our own version of the Curiosity Approach
    • Early Years Foundation Stage
    • Forest School sessions and Outdoor Learning
    • Yoga classes
    • Playball

Planning in the Moment

SKIPS is organised so that each child can decide where to play, inside or outside, which resources to use, whether to be alone and for how long they want to pursue an activity. By doing this they become deeply involved in their task and progress is happening constantly. The approach is based on the principal that children learn best when they are following their own interests.

The interactions that staff have with the children is the basis for being able to respond to each child’s needs and levels of development. Providing resources to extend the play in the moment and imparting new knowledge alongside the play, have a vital role.

Children playing in a muddy puddle
Encouraging children's natural curiosity

Our Version of the Curiosity Approach

Modern plastic toys and technology are removed from the learning environment and replaced with everyday items to encourage children’s natural curiosity and eagerness to explore and create. Research has shown curiosity to be associated with higher levels of positive emotions, lower levels of anxiety, more satisfaction in life, and greater psychological well-being. (Emily J Campbell, Ph.D.)
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