Early Years

Where It All Begins

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) at Hotham is at the heart of the school. After all, our Nursery and Reception classes prepare children for future learning and success. We believe children’s early years’ experience should be happy, active, engaging and secure, while supporting their development, care and learning needs.

Children leave our EYFS with a range of memorable and exciting learning experiences. We allow children to take ownership of their own learning, encouraging them to be active and independent learners. The learning environment we create ensures that self-initiated learning is automatic and spontaneous, leading to enthusiastic, curious and confident children with enquiring minds.

We ensure that the learning process will be a ‘two-way’, and we involve parents and families so that we can share and celebrate our children'’s successes, achievements and development together.

Curiosity and Opportunity

It goes without saying that our Early Years setting follows the statutory framework, which includes 7 areas of learning and development that are equally important and inter-connected.

However, the three areas known as the ‘prime areas’ are seen as particularly important for igniting curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, and for building children’s capacity to learn, form relationships and thrive.

The prime areas are:

Communication and language
Physical development
Personal, social and emotional development

The prime areas are strengthened and applied through 4 specific areas:

Literacy
Mathematics
Understanding the world
Expressive arts and design

In our Early Years, we ensure these areas of the curriculum are taught, explored and promoted in our provision in a number of different ways. These include:

Adult Led and Focused Activities - Activities are carefully designed to be open-ended and allow personalisation through skilled adult facilitation. They are mainly completed in small groups.

Enhanced Provision – Designed predominantly to encourage independent learning, this is carefully planned and resourced to enhance learning about a topic. It usually takes the form of role play areas, interest tables, games, props and topic books.

Continuous Provision and Child Led Activities - The indoor and outdoor classrooms are equipped with resources that allow children to make their own decisions about what they explore and learn. Adults can if appropriate, facilitate a child-initiated activity by making suggestions or providing equipment. Play is an essential part of learning as it enables children to internalise and make sense of their world.

Carpet time – the children come together as a class to share songs, stories and learn concepts together. Time spent learning together on the carpet increases throughout the year.

Enhanced French Provision – At Hotham we also have an enhanced French provision for all pupils. The children begin to learn French through songs, stories and repeated phrases such as commands. This is introduced gently in Nursery and more rigorously in Reception.

For more information about our curriculum, please see our nursery/reception overviews on our curriculum page, or by visiting individual subject pages.

Our Unique Core Book Curriculum

At Hotham, we aim to inspire a love of literature from a young age. Our Early Years curriculum has been thoughtfully designed with the use of ‘core books’. Over the year, the children will explore a diverse range of literature, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry books. These core books will act as a vehicle to drive the learning of the seven areas of our curriculum and lay the foundations of knowledge for learning in KS1. Alongside these high quality texts, the children will be provided opportunities to practice and apply new skills. We will invite real life experts to visit us, go on engaging trips and plan interesting activities and experiences throughout the year in order to bring the stories to life.

Early Years in the Forest

The Hotham Woodland is used to support pupils’ learning in Early Years across the areas of the EYFS curriculum. Our Forest School programme runs for pupils in nursery and reception, and focuses primarily on the children’s development in:

Communication and language;
Personal, social and emotional development;
Gross and fine motor skills;
Understanding of nature;
French immersion (sessions are often bilingual).

We are very fortunate to have two members of staff who are fully trained and accredited forest school leaders. We run sessions in small groups of no more than 15, meaning that children have a really rich learning experience carefully guided by qualified staff.

Joining our EYFS

At the end of the summer term we arrange meetings for parents of children starting Nursery/ Reception. This gives you an opportunity to meet the staff, hear all about the curriculum, find out what a typical day entails and a chance to ask any questions and share any information you would like to with our staff.

Information will be sent out to parents electronically and there will also a pack sent home with hard copies of supporting resources.

Parent presentations will be loaded onto the website once the meetings have taken place.