Curriculum Intent
At Greyfriars, we have designed our curriculum around the needs of our children to ensure that every child has the opportunity to thrive in a classroom environment! Our curriculum not only focuses on specific subject knowledge and skills but also provides children with opportunities to put these skills and knowledge into practice through what can be accessed through continuous provision time.
Our curriculum has been designed to ensure each and every child has every opportunity to belong to a caring community where they can enjoy their education and achieve their full potential! Our curriculum is bespoke to the needs of the pupils at Greyfriars Academy, not only focusing on specific subject knowledge, skills and understanding by providing opportunities for the children to develop personally, to equip them with the skills needed to become good citizens and make positive contributions to our future society. We are a busy town school in an area of deprivation. Our constantly evolving curriculum responds to the needs of the learners and their interests by reviewing and analysing the needs of the emerging cohorts.
Our Baseline in Sept/Oct 22 showed that our current EYFS cohort need additional support with oral blending, sequencing simple stories, fine motor skills including strength and dexterity and communication skills such as production of sounds and speaking in sentences. Across our curriculum, we provide opportunities for children to practise the personal development concepts and key skills including; communicating both verbally and through writing.
We want children to experience relationships and a learning environment which supports and enhances their confidence, emotional resilience and curiosity. Our EYFS 25/26 cohort at Greyfriars consists of children with a wide range of needs, ranging from communication and language to physical and sensory needs. Many of our children’s first language is not English and may or may not speak English at home. We want children to be able to access the environment and curriculum and be engaged in their learning regardless of their needs or skills. We take into account children’s individual needs and starting points and adapt our curriculum in response to these. Our Curricular goals demonstrate our high expectations for the children joining us and are linked to each of the Educational Programmes for EYFS. The goal for children to become a “Confident Communicator” reflects the high communication and interaction needs of our cohort and the fact that the development of children’s spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development. During exploration time, we ensure that there is a language rich environment which allows children to use new language in their play as well as providing opportunities to learn new words.
During our day, songs are key, we use them for tidying up, nursery rhymes but also during our morning slides and during phonics as well as we know that children learn through song and it helps to cement learning to memory.