The curriculum
The proposed curriculum for Leads ECC is EYFS. Early Year Foundation Stage provides support to children and helps to fully utilize their potential. Most children develop and learn during their early years, and the experiences they have between birth and age five have a remarkable impact on their future life. The prime areas of learning and development by which a child develop skills, gain knowledge, and demonstrate their understanding are:
1. Physical development
2. Personal, social, and emotional development
3. Communication and language
Proper development of these areas is essential for healthy growth and to have a better future learning. As children grow, they need to develop in five specific areas, and those areas are literacy, mathematics, expressive arts, science, and understanding the world. All these five areas help to plan the child’s learning and activities. It is the responsibility of teachers in supporting and teaching children according to their unique needs.
In EYFS framework, children learn by playing and exploring both indoors and outdoors. Each child develops their own skills according to their creativity, imagination and critical thinking.
All children registered in Leads ECC will be following guidelines in EYFS curriculum depending on the age group as appropriate.
How the Reggio Emilia approach together with the UK Early Years Foundation Stage will complement each other to ensure a seamless, quality provision.
The EYFS has four overarching principles that must shape the practice in early years settings.
Every child is unique and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured. The characteristics of effective learning, ‘engagement’, ‘active learning’, ‘creative’ and ‘critical thinking’ describe the behaviors children use in order to learn effectively. These attitudes and abilities make children strong, capable, and resilient, enabling them to make good progress in all the areas of learning. Children learn to be strong and independent through positive relationships. Involving parents in their children’s learning can make a crucial difference to children’s outcomes. Priority for good-quality partnerships is emphasized in the EFYS and Birth to 5 Matters . The quality of the home learning environment is an important predictor of children’s future outcomes.
Children learn and develop well in enabling environments with teaching and support from adults who respond to their individual interests and needs.
Importance of learning and development, and the characteristics of effective learning. The learning and development requirements define what providers must do, working in partnership with parents/carers, to promote learning in all children in their care
The Reggio Approach influences the nursery in many ways, most fundamentally in the nursery’s values of working together with families as colleagues, of celebrating the phenomenal potential of children and adults as learners and developing creativity among the whole nursery community.
The Reggio Emilia approach to early years education puts children in the driver’s seat and sees them as curious individuals with the power and potential to develop and learn from their environment and the relationships they build with others. All the early years frameworks now focus on the needs of individual children. This is important as we know children develop at different rates. They are all unique and come from different backgrounds. The Reggio Emilia Approach believes that a child has the right to be the protagonist of their own learning. The Reggio Emilia Approach is a child-centered approach, where teachers, parents, and the community are collaborators and partners in a child’s educational journey.
Leads ECC will implement the Reggio Emilia approach by these key points:
* Provide knowledge and help guide your children.
* Be a co-learner in their discovery.
* Listen, observe, document, and reflect.
* Provide stimulation of discovery through dialogue.
* Encourage your children to wonder and think.
* Develop children’s own questions and questioning skills.
The Reggio Emilia educational approach believes that through its guiding principles, children are better able to solve problems, engage with their community and environment, welcome new experiences, build social skills, express themselves with confidence, and enjoy learning. Other influences on the EYFS curriculum includes learning through playing with other children, also practitioners ensuring they provide opportunities for the encouragement of child-initiated play in addition to the emphasis on sensory and outdoor play with the children.