Our Curriculum

Intent

At Norton Hall Sunflower nursery we intend that our ambitious and inclusive curriculum educates all the children and contributes to a generation who will acquire the knowledge, skills and understanding to be able to succeed in society today. Our Aim is that children who come to nursery are happy, confident learners who become curious, Imaginative, Respectful and Positive and influence their wider thinking across all areas of the curriculum.

We are passionate about creating opportunities for children to become effective communicators and to be able to communicate more easily through developing language and communication skills. We focus on promoting communication and language to widen children’s vocabulary throughout the Nursery.

We wish our children to believe in their own abilities and capabilities, to belong to the nursery learning community as well as the wider community, to become successful in their academic career now and in the future. Our curriculum celebrates diversity and supports the children’s spiritual, moral, social and emotional development so that they feel safe, secure and are ready to learn.

Our Nursery curriculum incorporates the statutory requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum as well as opportunities and experiences which best meet the children’s developmental and learning needs, allowing them to flourish.

The children also have Key worker activities in small groups. Learning is carefully planned by staff following the children’s needs to support communication and language development; personal, social and emotional development; and physical development as well as literacy, mathematics, understanding of the world and expressive arts and design.

Implementation

At Norton Hall Sunflower Nursery we encourage children to demonstrate their attitudes and behaviours to learning through the characteristics of Effective Learning.

These are:

Playing and exploring

• Practitioners encourage a ‘can do’ attitude so children are willing to take a risk in new experiences.
• encourage curiosity and independent exploration
• extend children’s learning -develop children’s language
• feed in new vocabulary and challenge children’s thinking
• Children are confident to try out new ideas and are not afraid to ‘have a go’

Active learning 

• Not to be confused with being physically active. In effective active learning, children maintain their attention for a period of time and are not easily distracted because they are interested and fascinated by the activity.

Creating and thinking critically

• Practitioners help children to develop so that they make connections in their learning, make predictions and are able to think things through.
• Children learn to apply skills in different context and consider the best way of completing a task without waiting to be directed. Children are thinkers who make sense of their experiences. Using what they already know to learn new things, linking information as concepts are developed and linked together, and finding meaning in sequence and cause and effect.
• Children giving their own explanations about how they solve a problem learn more than when they receive positive feedback and/or explanation of their errors-this is why young children watching and learning from older children benefits both.

Our curriculum is designed to recognise their prior learning by providing first-hand learning experiences and allowing the children to develop interpersonal skills, build resilience and become creative, critical thinkers to enable them to challenge themselves. We ensure the content of the curriculum is differentiated to meet the needs of all learners and is taught in a logical progression or sequence so that children build on prior learning.

We have highlighted that language and communication development is vital for our children who come from the local area. We welcome children from culturally diverse backgrounds and many of our children are at the early stage of learning English as an additional language (EAL). Communication and language development are therefore a consistent focus. We support children’s development by providing a rich language environment, where high quality adult interactions, conversations, singing nursery rhymes, sharing stories, retelling stories become a regular part of the children’s day.We use ‘core texts’ which we read frequently with the children. These books are the type of books that can be re-visited again and again, on different levels to support language development. The idea is that children will develop language and increase vocabulary in addition to gaining a love of stories and books and they will become very familiar with these known texts so that they can remember and re-tell them.