At KAPSH we cater for children from rising three to five years old. Our Nursery offers morning, afternoon and full day provision, as well as two Reception classes. Our Early Years Department promotes high quality teaching and learning to ensure all children achieve their full potential in a safe, happy and secure environment. We offer an exciting learning environment promoting high quality dialogue and a culture of intellectual curiosity. As Early Years practitioners, we aim to create ‘awe and wonder’ through play-based learning, which allows our children to be at the centre of their own development and education.

At KAPSH we believe that a positive, synergistic relationship between teachers and children are at the heart of education. Our team strive to ensure that every child feels supported and nurtured, as this dynamic creates an effective environment for learning to take place, with no child left behind. We aim to give ongoing new and challenging experiences, to ignite the children’s curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, which prepares them for future academic excellence in Year 1.

Our curriculum is designed with the intent that every child is spiritual by nature and therefore possesses incredible capacity for learning and growth. The experiences we provide are wide ranging and open ended, to ensure we value all children’s interests. Provision is carefully planned with the vision that all children develop at their own pace. We ensure that every child can access our broad and balance curriculum, providing enrichment opportunities to enhance children’s experiences.

The curriculum design in EYFS comprises of the seven areas of learning and development, from the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework. At KAPSH we follow an open-ended topic-based approach, using ‘I wonder’ questions to broaden children’s thinking processes, develop their speech and language skills, and to build confidence in their ability to express themselves. Our curriculum design has developed through focusing on children’s choices, activities and experiences, building on the knowledge they bring from their homes and communities. We aim to develop this essential knowledge and skills to support children when becoming educated citizens.

Our children are taught a bespoke Yoga, Music, Sanskrit and PRE-curriculum, delivered by fully qualified specialist teachers.

At KAPSH we believe that parents or co-educators play a vital role in promoting achievement. We welcome parental contributions and work closely with all our families to ensure they are supported throughout their child’s school journey. We arrange a home visit session to welcome all our Nursery and Reception children, also allowing our practitioners to understand your child’s individual needs. Our Early Years team are committed to ensuring parents feel empowered when supporting their children at home. We work regularly with parents, providing bespoke next steps and suggested activities to consolidate and practise at home. Furthermore, we enjoy inviting parents into the classroom to stay and play, as well as observing our teaching inputs in Phonics and Maths. We encourage children to apply their learning to life outside of school. We provide parents with a weekly learning overview, in order to keep them in the know regarding learning for the week. In addition to this we schedule practical weekly home learning activities focusing on revisiting phonics sounds taught in the week, consolidating or extending maths skills and an engaging topic activity.

At KAPSH we have a well-organised system for teaching reading, which starts from the Early years. We believe that early reading ignites creativity, sparks curiosity and stimulates our children’s imagination. Our team aim to create confident and passionate early readers, using the Twinkl scheme to deliver a synthetic phonics programme. We deliver high quality phonics sessions that build and develop the skills and understanding children need to become effective, independent readers and writers.

In Reception, we strive to ensure that all children learn to read, focusing on in the moment interventions with children who need extra support. We have short and discrete daily phonics sessions which introduce grapheme-phoneme correspondence, blending and segmenting. Reading books are sent home on a weekly basis and connect closely to the phonics knowledge that our children are taught. Our Reception team spend time reading with the children throughout the week, focusing on decoding and comprehension skills. This ensures that teachers are able to quickly identify any gaps in understanding and provide in the moment interventions to ensure rapid progress.

At KAPSH we promote a love of reading; the children enjoy visiting the library once a week, celebrating storytelling week, world book day and engaging in poetry competitions. Furthermore, we love to bring our stories to life through weekly ‘hooks’ to create excitement around the text. This could be a giant’s footprints left in the classroom, a secret fairy door appearing in the garden, or even a treasure hunt! These hooks create awe and wonder in our classrooms and encourage children to engage in role play, building their confidence and communication and language skills, this also provides opportunities for children to get into character and act out real life roles or fictional performance from the variety of stories and texts that they have been learning about.

From the moment our children join us in Early Years, we encourage and promote mark making as it is the first stage of writing. Children enjoy creating different patterns, lines, textures and shapes. This may be on a piece of paper, on the ground, outside in the outdoor classroom, or on an object or surface. At KAPSH we believe that mark-making, in all forms needs to be valued, encouraged and discussed.

When encouraging children to write, we focus on pencil grip and control. The children have access to a variety of activities during the day to strengthen their fine motor skills, muscle control and hand-eye coordination. Making marks enables children to explore how they hold a mark making tool such as a pencil, crayon, paintbrush, and which grip and hands suits them best.

Children in Reception are always encouraged to apply their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words and make phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words. Furthermore, we teach children small rhymes to help them form letters. At KAPSH we have mark making trolley’s in each classroom, indoors and outdoors, giving the children the freedom to write as they choose, using the tools that they want. Children can often be seen writing letters, card, lists, storybooks and captions, which are links to their play. Furthermore, the children have access to sound mats and word mats to support them when writing. They are able to independently access these supportive resources when writing in any area of the Early Years Setting.

At KAPSH we believe that Early Maths provides vital life skills that help prepare our children for the wider world.  Maths can be seen across all areas of the classroom, whether it is using a phone in the home corner, sorting objects or designing a tower in the construction area. We teach Maths using the ‘White Rose’ programme, with sessions taught daily in Reception. This mastery approach to Maths ensures that children have a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts whilst embracing Maths challenges with a positive can-do mindset.

In EYFS we focus on three concepts; problem solving, reasoning and fluency. The children enjoy the practical daily sessions, which are then extended, consolidated and challenged throughout their continuous provision. Our Early Years curriculum ensures that mathematical skills are also enhanced through the children’s interests. For example, cooking, playing in sand and water and exploring properties of objects all ensure meaningful contexts and the extension of mathematical thinking.

The outdoor environment plays a huge role when supporting the development of children’s mathematical skills. It enables the children to investigate shape, distance and measures. Furthermore, children have access to various resources where they can compare, sort and order natural materials. We also ensure that each child has been supported and assessed in a 1:1 session every week focusing on the topic and concept taught across the week.