Early Years
Intent
At Phoenix Infant Academy we believe that all children deserve the best start in their early education. It is our intent to create an outstanding environment that supports each unique child at Phoenix Infant Academy to flourish and achieve their best. Teaching and learning is at the heart of all we do and adults support children through high quality interactions daily in both adult led and child led learning.
Through both rich indoor and outdoor provision and teaching and learning we want to foster curiosity, creativity and confidence in each child. Thus intending all children to flourish both academically and personally throughout their learning journeys with us. We will provide a rich, diverse, ambitious and inclusive curriculum that ensures all children make progress from their starting points.
Parent partnerships are vitally important to us at Phoenix Infants and we will ensure parents and carers are fully supported from the start on how they can support their child’s learning at home. Together we will collaborate so that each child has a solid foundation and are prepared for the next stage in their learning journey with us.
Implementation
We highly value the importance of early childhood education and implement the EYFS framework through a combination of adult-led teaching and child-led learning. We recognise that our children need a range of teaching approaches to ensure our teaching is inclusive and meets the needs of all our children.
Our curriculum is intentionally planned to meet the needs of our unique children. Through a thoughtfully planned curriculum sequenced with key knowledge, skills that we want our children to learn and experience. Big questions, meaningful experiences, activities and rich provision supports each child’s needs and next steps. Our curriculum is broad and balanced and promotes the skills and knowledge that all children need to be successful learners. We are dedicated to ensuring our children love to read through our rich provision of using high quality planned texts, teaching synthetic phonics daily using RWI and Talk4Writing which compliments and supports learning across all areas of our curriculum.
The adult’s role is key in instilling a love of learning as well as ensuring all children achieve through both their explicit and discreet teaching through high quality teaching, scaffolding, modelling and questioning supports all children to progress from their starting points. Adults continuously use formative assessments in the moment to move children’s learning on as well as reflecting on what the children can do and where adaptions need to be made to ensure we are responsive We want our children to be inspired by our curriculum and have a desire to want to learn and ask questions and more questions to continue to nourish their appetite for learning new knowledge and skills.
At Phoenix Infants, we always think about what our community means to us. We explore our community spaces, interview real local people and ask lots and lots of questions!
Impact
Children will demonstrate high levels of engagement in activities, developed their speaking and listening skills, enabling them to access their learning and communicate to both adults and children. Children will develop skills across all areas of the curriculum including literacy, mathematics and physical development using these in different ways. Children will have developed a wider sense of the world around them from their rich and meaningful experiences they have shared and will draw on these experiences during interactions with others and link this to new learning. Children at the end of Reception will have developed essential knowledge and skills required for everyday life and lifelong learning.
Our curriculum creates a pathway for all children to achieve. Having a balanced approach between both child led and adult led teaching and learning, ensures that the children receive a high quality foundational experience.
This enables the children to transition into Year 1 from EYFS as competent, curious and capable children. Enriched with a wealth of knowledge, skills and unique experiences preparing them to be successful for the next stage in their learning journey.
For further information, please contact EYFS Lead, Miss G. Tait, on 01753 521888 or post@phoenixinfants.uk.