Early Years
At Bradford Primary School, our approach recognises the best practice in Early Years Education, ensuring a safe, happy and secure environment for children to develop and grow. We aim to provide children with a wealth of experiences that ignite their natural curiosities. Through a variety of well-planned learning opportunities, both indoors and outdoors, we tailor our learning around the unique interests of the children within our class. We ensure rich outdoor opportunities for discovering our natural world. The open-ended learning environments enable children to explore independently and to discover their own learning challenges and overcome these within their stimulating surroundings. We believe that all children deserve a holistic approach to education, where the unique child is celebrated, their talents and potential are nurtured and all children are supported to become a valued member within our classroom community.
Curriculum
We follow the Early Years Foundations Stage Statutory Framework; setting learning, development and care for children from birth to 5 years.
- ‘A Unique Child’ - this outlines child development and inclusive practice as well as keeping safe and well.
- ‘Positive Relationships’ - this concerns staff and parents working together and good bonds between staff and children.
- ‘Enabling Environments’ - this explains how the room is prepared and the greater outdoor environment is utilised.
- 'Learning and Development'- is the fourth principle and concerns providing a range of activities and experiences to promote independent learning across the seven developmental areas of learning as set out in the guidance.
The prime areas are:
- Personal, Social and Emotional Development - developing social skills, building self-esteem and confidence, promoting self-care, good behaviour and independence.
- Communication and Language - developing communication skills such as listening and speaking.
- Physical Development - movement, a sense of space, health and bodily awareness, using equipment, tools and materials.
The specific areas (through which the three prime areas are strengthened and applied) are:
- Literacy - encouraging children to link sounds and letters and to begin to read and write.
- Mathematics - providing children with opportunities to develop and improve their skills in counting, understanding and using numbers, simple addition and subtraction problems; and to describe shapes, spaces, and measures.
- Understanding the world - involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community through opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places, technology and the environment.
- Expressive arts and design involves enabling children to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials, as well as providing opportunities and encouragement for sharing their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a variety of activities in art, music, movement, dance, role-play, and design and technology.
Read Write Inc
At Bradford Primary School, we teach phonics through Read Write Inc. (RWI) which is a systematic synthetic phonics teaching programme. We believe that every child has the right to be successful and fluent readers and writers and that Phonics and Early Reading is the door to access lifelong learning.
Phonics is taught from the first day that pupils enter our school. In Nursery we get our youngest children 'Read Write Inc. Ready', so that they are ready for their RWI Phonics learning from day one of Reception class. The children in Reception and Year One are taught daily Read Write Inc. Phonics lessons before completing their Phonics Screening Check at the end of Year One. Where children need further consolidation of phonics learning to ensure fluency, they are given the opportunity through a daily phonics learning session.