Welcome to the Early Years Foundation Stage

• Teacher: Mrs Francis
• Teaching Assistants: Mrs Beard

Children spend the first year of schdool in the Foundation Stage which makes a crucial contribution to children's life-long learning and development. The ways in which a child engages with other people and their environment - playing and exploring, active learning, and creating and thinking critically - underpin all learning and development. These are the Characteristics of Effective Learning and we carefully ensure that children use a variety of these characteristics as they are incredibly important to how a child learns and develops good learning behaviours.

The three Characteristics of Effective Learning are:

• Playing and exploring - finding out, investigating and exploring things, 'having a go';
• Active learning - being involved, concentrating and persevering, being proud of achieving what they set out to do
• Creating and thinking critically - developing their own ideas, making links between learning and developing strategies for learning new things. 

There are seven areas of learning organised into Prime and Specific areas. Here at Castor CE Primary School we provide children with an engaging and exciting environment, both inside and outside, as well providing a range of teaching and learning opportunities appropriate to your child's development needs.

We follow the EYFS Statutory Framework and refer to the Development Matters guidance to support us in implementing the statutory requirements. There are four themes that underpin the guidance, and the principles that inform them ensure that each unique child has opportunities to interact in positive relationships and enabling environments.