Our Early Years Intent

Teaching staff strive to create a learning environment that enables every child to reach their full learning potential through fostering caring relationships where children feel safe, excited to learn and have a positive sense of well-being.

Our bespoke curriculum is designed with your child at the heart of it and learning through play is the core of what we do.  Through our continued cycle of planning, teaching and assessment, we ensure that children’s needs are met and that your child is prepared for future learning with a life-long attitude to always “being the best you can be”.

Your child will become a creative thinker and a risk-taker.  They will work and play cooperatively, sharing and taking turns, listen attentively and express their thoughts and ideas knowing that they are being listened to. Be able to solve problems and have a positive ‘can do’ attitude with a strong sense of resilience and regulate their own emotions and show sensitivity towards other children’s feelings. 

We want your child to enjoy learning and be excited about what tomorrow will bring.

We endeavour to prepare your child for learning and, through cultural capital, how to become a citizen of the future.

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Our journey with your child begins by ensuring that they are happy in their surroundings and are able to form positive relationships with the people around them.

We support and nurture children to feel confident to interact with other children, to make friends, we want to hear them talking and see them laughing and playing happily as relationships develop.  Through play, children learn how to share toys and take turns developing their vocabulary and language skills to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively. 

A love of reading is at the heart of our classrooms.  Stories and nursery rhymes are read to children frequently throughout the day to foster a 'pleasure for reading' while expanding their spoken vocabulary.  We teach children to read through our synthetic and systematic phonics scheme which is carefully planned and structured to ensure children become successful readers for life. Every child will have a decodable reading book that is matched to their reading ability. We teach children to write through ‘The Drawing Club’ where high-quality themed texts are chosen.  Books are chosen because they support our learning themes in class as well as books that are the children’s favourite stories. Children are taught how to make marks during play and by the end of the Reception year, children will know how to form letter shapes correctly while holding a writing tool with a comfortable grip during group handwriting sessions.

Mathematic sessions are taught daily through adult-led focused sessions and through play. Sessions are progressive and ensure that children leave the foundation stage with a secure and deep understanding of the value of numbers to 10 including the composition of each number, number bonds to 10 and can compare numbers in the number system.

Through the curriculum area of understanding the world, children learn how to embrace, celebrate and respect the world in which they live in.  They explore their immediate surroundings, including Birkdale village, and meet the people that help them to be citizens of their community. They experience first-hand the role of their community workers as we invite them into school. They will explore similarities and differences between life in this country and life in other countries. Life cycles and habitats will open their eyes to the vast world of animals and minibeasts that live on planet Earth. Seasons changing throughout the year will ignite discussion about the changes in weather, the clothing they wear when its warm and cold and the excitement of finding a conker on an autumn walk. Through stories, children will explore cultural festivals and celebrations around the world as well as events from the past.

Children will be expressive through music and dance and their creativity will be embraced and celebrated through their artistic creations.  They will safely use tools and a variety of materials to experiment with paint, clay, collage, chalks and oil pastels. 

We work closely with our parents, ensuring that there is a positive relationship between home and school.  Children are the heart of our setting, and we must ensure that a complete picture is built around the learning development and progress of your child.  We actively encourage you to support learning at home through a home activity book with enjoyable activities for you to complete at home together.  We welcome your support in helping your child become a reader for life as they read you their school reading book and there will also be the school library book that could be shared together as a bedtime story. Weekly phonics homework will be delivered on our school learning platform ‘Google Classroom’.  Then there are all the events that we invite you to join us at school throughout the year… and grandparents are always welcome too.