Early Years Curriculum
When children begin their education in Foundation 1 at Hallcroft we place a great deal of emphasis on developing their personal, social and emotional skills alongside their progress in other areas of the curriculum. We use our circle times, golden rules and learning rules to support the children's development in this area in conjunction with our supportive and encouraging ethos within school.
We support the children's use of and understanding of language, which is key in helping them to develop the skills they need to become confident learners. This is facilitated through our use of the "Big Question" to focus our daily work and our "Little Questions" to challenge the children in the continuous provision in our environment. We help the children to learn new words daily in our "Word Aware" time. We also run Speaking and Listening groups to help support children's language development when needed.
In Foundation 1 we construct our curriculum around topics which the children will be able to relate to such as "All About Me", "Animals" and "Transport". This allows the children to feel like experts who can make links to their own knowledge, which then in turn gives them the confidence to develop and extend their learning further.
We also aim to develop a love of books and reading in the Early Years. We have chosen our "10 favourite books" which we read regularly and use to hang our topics on, for example in our "All about Me" topic we read "Guess How Much I Love You?" and link the book to people we love. The children soon gain the language skills and confidence to retell these books independently and use them to scaffold their learning further.
In Foundation 2 our children participate in exciting curriculum topics which feed into the curriculum of our full time children. These topics change every half term and the themes covered are revisited across the years to allow the children to develop a deeper level of knowledge. The teachers carefully plan the curriculum to ensure that all areas of learning are fully developed through teacher led work and continuous provision in the environment.
