Early Years / Foundation Stage
At St David’s we are passionate about early years education! We have purposefully designed our inside and outside learning environments to meet the needs of our youngest learners, ensuring that we give children the very best opportunities to engage with each other, adults and the environment.
Our high-quality learning environment and resources promote curiosity and child led learning. Provision is carefully crafted, targeting children’s next steps while tapping into their interests. Children experience playing and exploring, active learning and opportunities to create and think critically to support their learning in the following areas:
Prime areas of learning: communication and language, personal social and emotional development and physical development.
Specific areas of learning: literacy, mathematics, understanding the world, expressive arts and design
Both the indoor and outdoor environments provide children with purposefully designed learning opportunities but also the possibility of self-selecting resources. Everything is clearly labelled with photographs at the child’s height!
Outdoor learning environment includes:
- Large scale construction- opportunities to construct imaginative structures on a large scale with a range of resources from tyres and blocks to steering wheels!
- Sand pit and digging equipment
- Water play- including guttering, jugs and containers
- Bikes and scooters
- Resources to explore the environment- bug hunting, magnifying glasses etc
Indoor learning environment
- Home corner- often redesigned to match a key text or learning theme
- A writing garden- desks and writing resources in a creative space
- Small world play- cars people, buildings
- Small scale construction blocks
- A sand trunk
- A sensory space
- Creative reading space
- Maths area full of counting bears and numerical representations!
- Creative arts –paints, pens pastels
- Junk modelling