Our Curriculum

At Wyndham Park Nursery School we are very proud of our curriculum. We follow the children’s interests to make sure our planned activities are relevant and interesting to our children, whilst also making sure key skills are addressed to ensure the children leave us ‘Primary School Ready’.

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)

The Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum is delivered through carefully planned activities and play opportunities to help ensure that all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential and experience the best possible start to their education.  The EYFS sets out seven ‘Areas of Learning and Development’ and together these make up the skills, knowledge and experiences appropriate for children as they grow, learn and develop.  They are:

Prime Areas

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development
• Physical Development
• Communication and Language

Specific Areas

• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the World
• Expressive Arts and Design

The Prime areas are fundamental, work together and move through to support development in all other areas.  The Specific areas include essential skills and knowledge for children to participate successfully in society.  Together they provide a balanced nursery curriculum. 

The curriculum at Wyndham Park Nursery School is cross-curricular and links many areas. It is our intention that during their time at Wyndham Park Nursery School, children will gain essential knowledge and experiences across these areas, making progress through the stages. It sits alongside the research-based guidance Development Matters and the 2023 Statutory Framework.

Goal Statements

These are our end of Nursery goal statements. These goals are underpinned by the 7 areas of learning and development in the statutory EYFS framework. They are not intended to limit the wide variety of rich experiences offered by our curriculum (educational programmes). They are goal descriptors fit for a child who is ready for the next part of their EYFS journey and on the path to achieving the Early Learning Goals in the Statutory Framework for the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage.

 

Personal Social and Emotional Development

Resilient Friends

We want each child to feel confident to express their own emotions and ideas. We want them to show resilience when faced with a problem and to show empathy for others.

Fun Friends

We want each child to have friendships, to know the joys of working as a team, creating imaginative worlds with others and to feel a strong sense of belonging to our community.

Communication and Language

Lovely Listeners

We want each child to listen. To be inquisitive about words, sounds and rhymes. We want them to be eager to know what words say, to show excitement when they see letters they recognise and have the important blending and segmenting skills that will set them up to be great readers.

Wonderful Wordsmiths

We want each child to use talk to begin great conversations about everything they know. We want to smile at the new amazing words they have and the new knowledge they are desperate to share. To question, explain, predict and share thoughts.

Physical Development

Brave Adventurers

We want each child to be physically adventurous. To run, jump, climb and balance. We want them to have a ‘can do’ attitude towards taking physical risks and feel pride when they achieve a new skill.

Literacy Development

Book worms

We want each child to love books. To show delight as they help to bring a story to life with words and actions. To have favourite stories and songs that they will remember for a lifetime.

Ready Writers

We want each child to be excited to write and draw. To know that they have the power to tell people things by the marks they make on the page. To be able to comfortably hold a pen and be eager to copy letters from their name.

Mathematical Development

Budding architects

We want each child to feel free to create and build. We want them to talk about their ideas and feel proud about how they solved problems and created new effects. To have autonomy over how they express themselves through construction. To not have to copy another person’s idea.

Counting Masters

We want each child to love and understand counting. To see numbers everywhere and be motivated to use their fluent number skills in all sorts of everyday situations, like counting the sticks they have found or checking to see the sweets are shared out fairly.

Understanding the World

Great Explorers

We want each child to be curious about the world around them. To spend time in the fresh air and experience the British weather! To not be afraid to get messy, to want to look closely, to marvel and wonder about the things they see, smell, touch and hear.

Proud Community Members

We want each child to feel special about the ways that make them, their families and their friends unique. To show curiosity about the diversity of life and to see both similarities and differences as something to celebrate.

Creative Development

Merry Music Lovers

We want each child to join in with the joy of singing. To have favourite songs, to dance and interact with music, songs and singing in a way that makes them happy.

Confident Creators

We want each child to feel free to create, to paint, mould, and pretend. To talk about their ideas and feel proud about how they solved problems and created new effects. To have autonomy over how they express themselves through construction, collage, paint and dough. To not have to copy another person’s idea

 

Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning

Learning about how children learn will always be ongoing, for us as a school but also with the ongoing research into the complexities of the brain. We strive to keep developing our skill sets by ensuring that we keep up to date with research and research based guidance.

As a school we believe strongly in the Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning set out in the Statutory Framework. We use these indicators to inform our teaching in a practical sense and also in helping us evaluate the quality of the learning taking place.  The first two characteristics concerned with engagement and motivation are central to how we work; making sure learning opportunities excite, spark and deepen interests so that children remain motivated and engaged.

 The Characteristics of Effective Learning are:

We still seek to challenge children and encourage them to approach problems, but we carefully manage the difficulty of tasks by considering the intrinsic difficulty of the task and of course the extraneous load placed on working memory by other factors. The aim is to actively support children to attach new information to other prior information.  This knowledge helps us to plan when and in what environmental context things are best explored and taught. For example, building on knowledge about minibeasts in the environment that they were last found (to aid recall), teaching or addressing mathematical misconceptions at a group time (to minimise distractions) and linked to a real context for example the sharing of snack or adding novel resources or adapting resources within pre-existing environments.

You can access more information about the EYFS via the following websites:

https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/

http://www.foundationyears.org.uk

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/early-years-and-childcare

https://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/eycc

http://www.education.gov.uk