Curriculum Intent
The curriculum in the Early Years provides a structure and sense of direction, whilst ensuring there is clear progression and ambitious opportunities for children to learn. Through valuing every child and believing that every child is capable of making good progress, we can ensure that no child is left behind. This is achieved through mapping out essential and potential themes and key skills, careful planning of the environment and purposeful, targeted assessment.
The 3 C’s outlined in the Primary Curriculum intent are woven through the EYFS curriculum.
Character
The Early Years Foundation Stage provides children with their first experiences of understanding who they are and their place in the world. This has been carefully built into the OCL EYFS Curriculum, building in explicit opportunities for children to begin to navigate their preferences and emotions and begin to accept more responsibility.
In addition to this, the 9 habits approach enables a tangible approach to character development, seen in all aspects of academy life. These are mapped against the Early Learning Goals to support children to embody the habits from the beginning of their OCL journey.
Competence
Reading and vocabulary are deliberately featured in all resources as we know children’s chances of success in later life are heavily dependent on their acquisition of language and ability to access written text. We also know the importance of using books to open up the world to our young people and developing a love of literature for future learning and cultural capital. Therefore, there are always links to key texts, key vocabulary and environment enhancements throughout the EYFS Curriculum resources. The innovative and exciting approach of Bookwings Phonics will also support this by developing a true love of books in our children, and then contextualising the learning of phonics to make learning to read and write meaningful and memorable.
Community
Understanding who you are and who you are becoming requires you to understand your place in time, past, present and future and also your place in the world at a local, national, global and spiritual level. These concepts are deliberately woven into our EYFS Curriculum in the Yearly Overview and Knowledge Organisers, with overarching questions to guide learning and reflection. These resources guide practitioners to consider their own school context to maximise the opportunities to develop a sense of community through the curriculum they deliver.