Early Years Foundation Stage

Welcome to St Thomas’ Early Years, our children are at the heart of everything we do. We value our children as unique individuals and through positive relationships and enabling environments we support our children to learn and aspire to be the best they can be.

We believe play is a key part to the delivery of our Early Years and we promote awe and wonder through a range of experiences and interactions based on our love of high quality texts. We want our children to be curious and encourage them to make links in their learning.

Early Years education focuses on seven areas of learning.
The three areas that are particularly important for building a foundation for igniting children’s curiosity and enthusiasm for learning are:

The 3 Prime Areas

 - Communication and language
 - Physical development
 - Personal, social and emotional development

As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in the other 4 specific areas, these are:
 - Literacy;
 - Mathematics;
 - Understanding the world and
 - Expressive arts and design.

Our Early Years curriculum is exciting, engaging and enjoyable. We offer opportunities for children to collaborate with each other and with staff to develop confident, powerful and independent learners who are determined and persevere. We understand the importance of language and to promote the development of this we use every opportunity to interact, to share a focus, to talk, to take turns whilst building a nurturing, language rich environment.
Our journey of learning consists of dive, delve, discuss and demonstrate where we explore to make sense of the wider world. When planning the children’s learning opportunities, we promote our star learners to encourage creative thinking and active learning, taking into account children’s interests, starting points and next steps. Our staff identify ‘Teachable Moments’ with children during planned learning opportunities and child-initiated play to teach next steps that enrich and expand the children’s learning.

The Reception Five underpins our curriculum to prepare children for Year 1.

Through flexible planning for both indoors and outdoors, we allow children time for sustained involvement in self-chosen provision as well as planned, high quality interactions to facilitate and extend children’s creativity and critical thinking.  
We foster a strong and respectful partnership with our parents and this sets the scene for our children to thrive.  

We have produced some documentation for Parents and Carers to ensure you have the relevant information about our School. We understand how important decisions are as a parent and really want to ensure you and your child get the best experience in starting their amazing School journey with us! 

At St Thomas’ Early Years is our Reception class as we do not have our own Nursery. We take children from many Early Years settings which are both school based and in the private sector. We hold induction sessions to welcome children and parents to our school. We dialogue closely with other Early Years settings. Children settle quickly into their new environment. Our Reception class is self-contained with its own toilets in the classroom and its own outdoor area.