Intent
At the Romford United Reformed Church Playgroup our intent for the children is that we help them to transition from home to school and provide a happy and safe place for them to grow and learn; to assess each individual child’s starting points and to provide them with the learning opportunities and experiences that will help them develop and progress across all areas of learning. Therefore we provide a curriculum that is grounded within the EYFS which helps them to learn and develop. We will strengthen their language, literacy and numeracy development within a curriculum based on the 7 areas of learning; while fostering a love of reading and stories and encouraging curiosity in the wider world, capitalizing on their interests. We ensure that we identify and support children with SEN, EAL and speech and language needs. We will teach the children the good behaviour that is expected within our society and teach them to respect themselves and other people. We will encourage a healthy attitude to food, hygiene, including oral health and exercise. We work in partnership with parents to support their children’s learning; building good relationships for us to work together to achieve the best outcomes for all of the children. Our playgroup is the beginning of the children’s lifelong journey of developing physically, verbally, cognitively and emotionally whilst rooting a positive attitude to their education and a love of learning.
Implementation
All our parents are given a parent pack on starting at playgroup; we have good relationships with them to support behaviour and values learned at playgroup and provide support and strategies for them to help with their toileting and eating etc at home. We use a key practitioner system and have a high ratio of consistent experienced practitioners every day. The manager and practitioners work as a team to decide how to implement the curriculum so that children make progress in the seven areas of learning. We focus on what the children already have, what they need and what they experience here at playgroup. We provide a 2 year old check for all children that start with us before their 3rd birthday and regularly monitor children’s progress though ongoing assessment and practitioner internal moderation sessions. The aim is for our programme of education to support all children in their learning; therefore we offer differentiated activities for the age and stage development of the children. We focus on the unique child, positive relationships, enabling environments and learning and development and use the Birth to Five matters checkpoints to highlight any child who is having difficulties; use Wellcomm to evaluate speech and language needs; have small group reading sessions and use a book lending system with story support cards to promote reading at home with our parents. Early identification of SEN is a priority and consistent monitoring and assessment supports this. We model and talk about good behaviour and rules with the children using the playgroups visual posters and we use Jolly Phonics to encourage literacy development and projects to give the children a wider understanding of the world. We evaluate our projects and assess what we are doing to see that it works and if we are really making a difference. We offer the children a play based environment using a variety of child led activities every day along with adult led focus activities or focussed teaching so the children can experience a broad curriculum. Practitioners are with the children at all times to model good language and extend children’s play and thinking as and when appropriate.
Impact
Children leave us having developed independence and confidence, and with the skills they need to take them into Reception at school. Readiness for school is the stepping stone for them to be confident, competent, lifelong learners and good citizens in their future lives. The EYFS gives them a solid foundation of learning to build upon. All children have an EYFS record book where their attainment and progress of their knowledge and skills can be measured and shared with the parents. Assessment data shows the children’s progress and highlights any needs and monitoring assessment can effectively demonstrate what learning is taking place; all children make excellent progress from their starting points. Project feedback from the children shows what they have learned and encourages them to use new language to talk about their experiences. We have very positive comments from our parents and also reception teachers and professional visitors to the playgroup. The impact of the EYFS curriculum is reflected in having well rounded, happy and confident children transitioning to School.
Romford United Reformed Church Playgroup 