For children at Catchgate their journey with us can begin from the age of 2 all the way till they are 5. By the end of a child’s time in Early Years, we want children to be confident, resilient and explorers of their own learning, in order to break their comfort zones. We vary learning styles and locations in order to enable children to practice skills taught in a varied and repeated way.

Staff in Early Years work closely together to plan for progression across the phase, working closely to prepare real life, engaging learning experiences that challenge children’s thinking at an age-appropriate level through the use of outdoors. We use open ended activities in the outdoors to challenge children’s thinking and help develop their communication and team work skills. All members of EYFS come together on a daily basis to reflect upon daily learning and to plan for the following day, in order to ensure that learning is relevant and reflective of children’s needs and interests.

Research and staff knowledge has taught us that scaffolding and challenge children’s thinking through conversation, motivates children to challenge themselves further. Similarly, children need to be confident in their surroundings before they are able to engage in academic learning. For that reason, it is essential that we build children's confidence and self-esteem, which will support their future approaches to learning, we have found that this works better in the outdoors. We spend time getting to know children and their families so that parents and carers are partners in children’s learning.

We spend our time outdoors in all weathers and use skills we have learnt in all areas of learning to develop our understanding when exploring outdoors. Our uniform consists of warm red hoodies, black jogging bottoms/ leggings, white polo top, black trainers and red all in one puddle suits.

Please visit our class pages to see all of the exciting things the children have been getting up to in EYFS.

Early Reading 

In early years we love reading stories, non fiction books, poems and rhymes. We love our monthly trip to the library with our grown ups where we get to develop our love of reading further. We strive to be confident communicators and spend lots of time speaking in larger groups and performing rhymes in collective worships. Every week our grown ups come into Nursery and listen to us perform a nursery rhyme too.