Early Years Curriculum

At Round Diamond, we believe that each child has the competency to flourish regardless of backgrounds, circumstances or needs. Children who enter our EYFS begin their lifelong learning journey of becoming independent, energised learners who thrive to reach their full potential through sustained engagement.

Our Early Years provision is organised by highly skilled and experienced leadership who work collaboratively with parents and carers to ensure a valuable partnership is formed and a broad and balanced curriculum is delivered. Early Years staff adapt their teaching opportunities to match the needs of all children, this is achieved through both encouragement and challenge.

Children have a variety of opportunities to develop their resilience and make good or better progress throughout their time in Early Years. Individual children’s progress is tracked through consistent, continuous formative assessment across all areas of their development.

We embed a positive attitude to school and a love of learning for our children through the delivery of our robust Early Years curriculum and stimulating environment. Children are encouraged to be curious, confident individuals across all areas of their learning.

Children’s interests are followed through language and play within a vocabulary rich environment. This provides children with the social and emotional resilience to support their continued learning journey. Children leave our Reception ready for the part of their education.

Physical Development

Physical activity is vital in children’s all-round development. Throughout the children's day at school, children engage with a variety of gross and fine motor experiences.

During PE and Child Initiated Learning, children develop their gross motor skills to support them in developing healthy bodies, their strength, agility, balance, spatial awareness and social and emotional well-being.

Fine motor control and precision activities are provided for children as soon as they enter the classroom during 'busy fingers'. These activities support children with their hand-eye co-ordination, in preparation early literacy and repeated and varied opportunities using small tools, with feedback and support from adults. By doing this, children are able to develop proficiency, control and confidence.

Literacy

It is paramount that children to develop a life-long love of reading within our setting. Children are provided with an abundance of rich language comprehension opportunities and they are taught to read words through our robust reading curriculum.

Our children begin their language comprehension journey in their very first moments of nursery. Our well skilled adults take the time to talk with children about the world around them, share a variety of stories and non-fiction books, enjoy rhymes, poems and songs together as part of the daily routine.

Skilled word reading, taught later, involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. This is achieved through our chosen phonics programme, Essential Letters and Sounds and supported by our daily literacy lesson in Reception.

At Round Diamond, children develop their writing skills from their first days at school. In Nursery, children can explore a wide range of mark making tools that support them in being able to give meanings to their marks and then into the transcription of writing, focussing on spelling, handwriting and composition as they continue their literacy learning journey into Reception and beyond.

Communication & Language

This area underpins all seven areas of learning and development in the Early Years and the interactions in our setting are paramount in our children's language and cognitive development.

Throughout the school day, children have quality conversations in a language-rich environment with both adults and peers. Adults tirelessly comment on what children are interested in or doing, and echo back what they say, remodelling where needed or with new vocabulary added to extend children's learning. This allows practitioners to build children's language effectively.

In Early Years and beyond, children are read to daily and we endeavour to engage them actively in stories, non-fiction texts, rhymes and poems. Following this, we then provide our children with extensive opportunities to use and embed new words from our reading in a range of contexts. This is achieved through conversation, story-telling and role play. These opportunities are then followed by individual, in the moment, sensitive questioning that invites them to elaborate, this in turn allowing children the opportunity to thrive in our text centred curriculum.

Expressive Art & Design

Our children have regular, daily opportunities to engage with the arts through both Child Initiated Learning and adult-led teaching. This enables them to explore a wide range of media and materials and develop their cultural awareness through discrete teaching sequences.

The quality and variety of what children see, hear, repeat and participate with allows children to self-express, enhance their vocabulary and communicate through the arts at a greater level.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

At Round Diamond, we know that children’s personal, social and emotional development (PSED) is crucial for children to lead healthy and happy lives, and is fundamental to their cognitive development.

Children have strong and supportive relationships with adults and we support children in learning how to understand their own feelings and those of others. This includes supporting children to manage their own emotions, develop a positive sense of self, set themselves simple goals, have confidence in their own abilities, to persevere and to understand the boundaries of having to wait for what they want at times.

Through adult modelling and guidance, children learn how to look after their bodies and this is supported by their interactions with other children. They learn how to make good friendships, co-operate and resolve conflicts peaceably, providing them with a secure platform fat school and in later life.

Understanding the World

In our Early Years setting we guide children in making sense of their physical world and the community they live in.

We know that the frequency and range of children’s personal experiences increases their knowledge and sense of the world around them – from visiting parks, to meeting important members of society such as police officers. Therefore, we begin providing children with the opportunity to explore, comment and observe the world around them from their very first days with us. Children have free-flow Child Initiated Learning time both inside and outside, are encouraged to share their personal experiences openly between home and school via our online learning journeys, observe seasons and their changes daily and on termly walks in the local area with different family members and experience visitors such as vicars and firefighters to enhance their knowledge, understanding and cultural capital.

In addition, children listed to a broad selection of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems to foster their understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world. This continues to allow us to build on important knowledge, extending their familiarity with words and enriching their vocabulary to support later reading comprehension skills.

Mathematics

Maths is paramount in our learning environment. Children in our Early Years develop a strong grounding of number so that they have the building blocks to excel mathematically.

We endeavour for all of children to  be able to count confidently, develop a deep understanding of the numbers to 10, the relationships between them and the patterns within those numbers. Children have  frequent and varied opportunities to build and apply this understanding, supported by the use of manipulatives and an understanding of mathematical vocabulary from which mastery of mathematics is built.

Children also have rich opportunities to develop their spatial reasoning skills across all areas of mathematics including shape, space and measures. At Round Diamond we foster an ethos of positive attitudes and interests in mathematics by looking for patterns and relationships, spotting connections, ‘having a go’, talking to adults and peers about what they notice and not being afraid to make mistakes, simply learning from them instead.