Early Years Foundation Stage Aims:
The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) sets the standards that all early years providers must meet to ensure that children learn and develop well and are kept healthy and safe. It promotes teaching and learning to ensure children’s ‘school readiness’ and gives children the broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good future progress through school and life.
The EYFS seeks to provide:
• Quality and consistency in all early years settings, so that every child makes good progress and no child gets left behind
• A secure foundation through planning for the learning and development of each individual child, assessing and reviewing what they have learnt regularly
• Partnership working between practitioners and with parents and/or carers
In EYFS at Mill Hill we aim to ensure all of our children leave reception confident and autonomous learners who have a curiosity and excitement for learning. We want to equip children with the skills to develop and progress and enjoy the curiosity of the wider world around them. We want our children to have empathy for others and develop strong peer relationships. We want to provide learning opportunities that inspire children to be creative, curious and resilient.
Our Mission
In reception we aim to create curious, autonomous learners by;
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providing children with the opportunity to take ownership and responsibility for their own play and environments.
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Give children a voice and choice in the direction of their learning
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Strong home- school links which allow us to have a deeper understanding of the child and their interest and needs
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Give them opportunities to make mistakes
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Creating an open-ended language rich learning environment which challenges the children to create their own learning opportunities
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Spending time with the children developing connections through high quality discussions to gain a deeper insight into what they know, need and do.
Indoor Provision
We have a variety of areas within our provision which are enhanced with natural, open ended resources that as far as possible are created from recycled 'real life' sources to ensure learning has a meaningful context for our children. We encourage the children to access and extend their own learning through child initiated play. We are led by the children as it is their learning environment and change our areas according to their needs and interests.
Outdoor Provision
The children have access to the outdoors every day in our Reception outdoor area and outdoor learning sessions in our wider school grounds once a week. We allow the children to choose whether they want to learn indoors or outdoors during independent learning time, using a free flow approach.
The outdoors mirrors the indoors in the sense that we have transient areas which are enhanced with natural, open ended resources, which are adapted and changed according to the children’s needs and interests. In addition to these areas the children have access to large scale construction, climbing apparatus and gardening resources that they may not be able to access inside.