Parent Support Sheets
Further Guidance
Early Years
Welcome To Our Outstanding Early Years!
Our Early Years provision offers a nurturing, stimulating environment where children are supported to thrive across all areas of learning. Our high-quality outdoor provision acts as a ‘Third Classroom’, providing rich opportunities for exploration through a large sandpit, mud kitchen, and well-planned areas for reading, writing, mathematics, and creative play. These experiences support children’s physical development, communication and language, their personal, social and emotional development, helping them to develop a secure understand the world around them.
Indoors, our spacious, open classrooms promote collaborative and child-initiated learning, guided by experienced and caring staff who know each child well. We have two Reception classes with 30 places in each, alongside morning, afternoon, and full-day Nursery provisions and a playgroup, ensuring a strong and confident start to school life.
Our Early Years Vision
At Warstones, our Early Years provision offers a rich, inclusive, and inspiring curriculum that lays strong foundations for lifelong learning. We support children aged 2 to 5 by nurturing curiosity, resilience, kindness, respect, aspiration, responsibility, and independence, while valuing each child’s unique experiences and starting points. By enhancing Cultural Capital and broadening children’s horizons, we ignite imagination, build confidence, and develop a secure understanding of the world, ensuring every child feels safe, valued, and ready for future learning.
We carefully plan our environment and curriculum to provide a range of stimulating opportunities to promote children's development in all of the following areas, which are outlined in the Early Years Foundation Stage Reform guidance produced by the Department of Education:
Prime Areas of Learning:
Communication and Language
Physical Development
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Specific areas of learning:
Literacy
Mathematical Development
Understanding of the World
Expressive Art and Design
All areas of learning are connected together. The characteristics of effective teaching and learning weave through them all. That's because children in the early years are becoming more powerful learners and thinkers. These characteristics develop as they learn to do new things, acquire new skills, develop socially and emotionally and become better communicators (Development Matters 2020).
The Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning are:
Playing and Exploring - children investigate and experience things, and 'have a go'
Active Learning - children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties and enjoy achievements
Creating and Thinking Critically - children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas and develop strategies for doing things
We also ensure that children receive the best start in their education by ensuring we follow the seven key features to effective early years practice:
The best start for every child
High quality care
The Curriculum: what we want children to learn
Pedagogy: helping children to learn
Assessment: checking what children have learnt
Self-regulation and executive function
Partnership with parents
Our units are driven by key texts. Topics have been specifically selected to provide the best foundations for learning.
Workshop Resources
Reading resources:
“The youngest children get the very best start to school life”