The Early Years Foundation Stage at Maidenbower Infant School
The Importance of Play!
Play is an essential way for young children to learn. It brings the world around them alive and allows them to make sense of it all through doing!
Play helps young children to:
• have fun and enjoy learning
• be active
• learn about themselves
• relate to others
• explore the world around them
• practise and build up ideas, concepts and skills
• learn how to behave in certain situations and understand the need for rules
• take risks and make mistakes
• think imaginatively
• communicate with others
• investigate and solve problems
• express fears or relive anxious experiences within a safe environment.
The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum is based on a philosophy of ‘play’. It encourages children to explore the world around them by investigating, asking questions and allowing themselves to become totally immersed in an activity.
Just like adults, children learn best by ‘doing’! For example, building a tower with bricks allows them to explore shapes, counting, balancing, negotiating with other children, estimating, measuring, falling down, and how to rethink their model in order to make it stay up. Adults or other children may intervene once children have had a chance to explore their mistakes by showing them how to build a firm foundation, or using bricks all of the same size. The children can then explore their new found way of building a tower.
In the Early Years Foundation Stage the children participate in ‘structured’ play. Our learning environment provides access to all areas of the curriculum. Children are given time to engage in their own play as well as time when they are given a directed task.
All activities are carefully planned to ensure that they are challenging, interesting, allow time to practise new skills or take skills one step further.
The children are observed during play to see how they tackle a task, how they interact with others and to see where they are in their understanding and learning. The observations are then used to plan further activities and learning steps.
So what can you do at home to help?
Provide opportunities when you can play with your child.
• Cooking
• Making a card
• Dressing up
• Playing a game
• Making a farm or castle
Provide opportunities where your child can play alongside others
• Friends round for tea
• Swimming
• Playing in the garden or park
• Joining a club
But two of the biggest ways you can help your child is to talk to them about what they are doing whilst playing and give them time to play. Children who are happy, confident and able to learn by their mistakes without feeling failure will give them firm foundations for life-long learning!
Alongside play, Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED) is also at the heart of the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum. This is an important area of development that allows children to develop skills for life!
Our aims at Maidenbower Infant School are for children to:
• Feel safe, secure and trust the practitioners that work with them.
• Develop respect for themselves and others.
• Respect children’s culture so that they develop a positive self image.
• Learn about relationships and the importance of friendships.
• Become life long learners
• Solve problems.
This area of the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum is split into 6 sections and these are;
.Dispositions and Attitudes
.Self-Confidence and Self-esteem
.Making relationships
.Behaviour and Self-control
.Self-care
.Sense of Community
At nursery and school, we teach PSED through a range of activities as well as everyday occurrences within daily life. We have circle time to play games, talk about emotions, discuss situations and learn to build respect and co-operation. We use role-play to help children learn skills of negotiation, act out scenarios, including ones that they might have a fear of such as going to the dentist. We use show and tell times for children to talk about themselves and for others to listen and learn about each other lives. We talk about keeping healthy and looking after ourselves and others. PSED also runs through every other area of development. We use our topics to incorporate the community and wider world where children can see how other people live and relate it to their own lives. Daily occurrences are learning to say sorry, finding other ways to deal with our emotions other than physically, and understanding how friendship works.
There is so much to PSED that it would be impossible to list, but this leaflet will hopefully help you to understand some of the elements that it covers.
What can you do at home to help?
• Well, you probably do lots of it already!!!!!
• Games that teach taking turns are always valuable.
• If you have been to a wedding or festival – encourage your child to bring in photos or items and they can discuss it at nursery and school.
• Encourage them to ask questions about what they see or do – and remember that you don’t always have to have the answers!
• Talk to your child about everyday events, such as what they see and do.
• Listen to your child – especially if they seem unsettled or anxious. Let us know as well – we can also keep an eye on your child.
• It is also important for us to know if anything has happened to your child at nursery and school – as children learn about friendships, incidents can happen and we take these very seriously so please do tell us.
