At King’s Oak School we believe that Early Years is the bedrock of education. It’s a unique time span where the brain is most malleable, and language is best acquired. At King’s Oak we know that starting in the Foundation stage is a huge change in a child’s life, and therefore we provide support and guidance for both children and parents through every step of this new exciting journey. We work closely with each individual family to ensure that each child settles in their own time and at their own pace.
A holistic, fully immersive English language learning environment ensures that the children acquire English naturally and enjoy a smooth transition into Primary and the English National Curriculum.
The Foundation Stage at King’s Oak is truly the place where children build the foundations of their learning and shape their attitude to education for future years. It is because of this that we have an informal yet structured setting which allows each individual child to develop and learn at their own pace. The smaller class sizes found in our nursery provide a far more “hands on” practical and engaging activities for younger children.
Larger indoor and outdoor environments provide greater opportunities for exploration and creative play – the main way in which young children learn. This was an extraordinary benefit during this challenging academic year. The activity habits that we develop in early childhood matter. Healthy eating, physical exercise, our relationship with the outdoors – they all form the basis for a child’s whole lifestyle, in the short- and long-term. We’ve known about many of these crucial benefits to outdoor learning in the EYFS for some time now but this academic year we had a new reason why we encouraged our children to spend even more time outdoors because the transmission of the virus is lower outdoors and that it is easier to follow COVID secure guidelines in open spaces.
We were pleased to embrace more outdoor learning and to cover all seven areas of learning and development outdoors as well as providing opportunities for children to build the important characteristics of effective learning skills for life too. We believe that these are present as children actively learn through first-hand experiences of the world, show curiosity, play and explore as well as take chances to create and think critically about the world they’re exploring.
