Early Years

Rookery Renowned For Empowering Learners

The children at Rookery are at the heart of this community. We recognise that each and everyone of them is unique with their own ideas, talents, needs and aspirations. Working together in harmony with parents who share with us this responsibility of educating our children. We prepare them for a world beyond our school.

Intent: Why do we teach what we teach?

At Rookery School we place great value on the development of children as individuals and providing them with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to prepare them for the challenges in Key Stage One and beyond. Our aim in the EYFS is to build strong foundations rooted in academic success as well as moral and spiritual development, so that ultimately our pupils can be successful, go on to be active citizens of society and happy, curious life-long learners.

Our curriculum is therefore the cultural capital we know our pupils need so that they can gain the knowledge, skills and understanding they require for success. They can only do that if we embed the right habits for learning through the Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning – Play and Exploration, Active Learning and Creative and Critical Thinking.

We  teach them how to listen, speak and meet the high expectations for behaviour by working together and being kind. As such, we prioritise personal, social and emotional development and communication and language in the Early Years Setting.   Our enabling environment and warm, skilful adult interactions support the children as they begin to link learning to their play and exploration.

We invest time and energy into helping pupils set and reflect on their own goals by aiming high and developing a love of reading, writing and number.  This is delivered through a holistic curriculum which maximises opportunities for meaningful cross-curricular links and learning experiences as well as promoting the unique child by offering extended periods of play and sustained thinking following children’s interests and ideas.  We value imagination and creativity and seek to create a sense of enjoyment and fascination in learning through a vibrant continuous indoor and outdoor provision, visits and regular forest school sessions. Our investment in specialist teachers in art and physical development mean that children continually receive high quality teaching.

Implementation: How do we teach what we teach?

Pupils learn through a balance of child-initiated and adult-directed activities.  The timetable is carefully structured so that children have rigorous directed teaching of phonics, maths and  circle time sessions to focus on essential basic skills and  PSED.  These sessions are followed by group work where children work with a member of staff to develop their individual targets.  This focused group time means the teacher can systematically check for understanding, identify and respond to misconceptions quickly and provide real-time verbal feedback which results in a strong impact on the acquisition of new learning.

Children are provided with plenty of time to engage in ‘exploration’ throughout the variety of experiences carefully planned to engage and challenge them in the provision. The curriculum is planned for the inside and outdoors and equal importance is given to learning in both areas. The curriculum is planned in a cross-curricular way to enable all aspects of the children’s development including understanding the world and expressive art and design as well as to promote sustained thinking and active learning. Intellectual preparation and co-planning is led by the Early Years Leader every week with short 15 minute ‘child-led’ planning sessions happening three times a week.  During these sessions the teachers reflect on three questions: “What do our focus individuals need to learn or are curious about? What embedded learning have we observed in this area?  What can be changed to exploit the learning and interests of the children/individuals in this area?”  In this way, we ensure that the children contribute to their environment and that the provision leads to depth of learning across the curriculum.

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum.  We promote and celebrate the love of reading in every aspect of  learning. We have a clear reading spine and many additional texts that are shared with the children depending on how they lead the learning.

Children follow the rigorous and highly successful Read, Write Inc program faithfully so that they meet the age appropriate expectations for reading.

Early Years have a big question to answer over the course of the year which is broken down into a questions . The themes are based on questions from the EYFS curriculum: from “how many do friendships grow?” as part of PSED, to “how can I be healthy?” related to health and self-care. From this, we have chosen multiple high-quality texts to create an integrated approach to learning from which pupils can experience the full curriculum.

We follow White Rose Hub  in Reception with an emphasis on studying key skills of number, calculation and shape so that pupils develop deep understanding and the acquisition of mathematical language.  Pupils learn through games and tasks using concrete manipulatives which are then rehearsed and applied to their own learning during exploration. Nursery pupils begin to develop these key skills during daily maths sessions where they explore sorting, quantities, shape, number and counting awareness.  These early mathematical experiences are carefully designed to help pupils remember the content they have been taught and to support them with integrating their new knowledge across the breadth of their experiences and into larger concepts.

Our inclusive approach means that all children learn together but we have a range of additional intervention and support to enhance and scaffold children who may not be reaching their potential or moving on children who are exceeding national expectations. This includes, for example, staff  use ‘pinny time’ which is a quick, on the spot intervention focused on sight words, blending and number retention with target individuals. The characteristics of effective learning are viewed as an integral part of all areas of learning and are reflected in our observations of children.

Our regular monitoring of teaching and learning includes coaching and feedback from from peer teacher using the Zinia Reaseach approach so that teachers develop a good subject knowledge and are effectively supported.  We tailor our staff CPD to be early years specific and are focused on moderating outcomes across the phase so that every member of our team feels confident in making accurate judgements about where individual pupils are and their next steps for learning.

Impact: How do we know what pupils have learnt and how well they have learnt it?

Our curriculum needs to meet the needs of our children, including our disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND, so we spend time looking at and evaluating how children are learning.  This is achieved through talking to children, looking at their work, observing their learning experiences and analysing data and progress by year group, class, groups and individuals. Every member of staff uses ongoing observational assessment to identify children’s starting points and plan experiences which ensure progress. This information is tracked using O’track which enables us to measure our starting points against a national data set.    We use this information on a weekly basis to plan learning experiences and next steps so that knowledge and skills are built cumulatively.   During each assessment window, three times a year, teachers update the progress children have made onto O’track which allows us to assess the impact of teaching and evaluate whether it has been enough.   Evidence of children’s learning including observations, work samples, photographs and contributions from parents are recorded on Class Dojo which children use to reflect on their progress through pupil voice.

During their time in our EYFS, children make rapid progress so that they meet the national expectation for GLD at the end of the year.  Pupils also make good progress toward their age-related expectations before transitioning into Year One.  We believe our high standards are due to the enriched play-based exploration alongside the rigour of assessment and teaching the children have as they move through the early years – a rich diet of balanced learning experiences is undoubtedly the best way to develop happy, curious children.