The Shooting Stars Curriculum
Shooting Stars Curriculum
Our focus is to ensure that every child is offered equal opportunities to be able to grow within our setting as individuals. We aim to offer a relaxed, welcoming, and enriched environment which supports children’s desires to explore and discover as they learn and develop.
The Shooting Stars Child will be confident, independent, and resilient. We aspire for every child to leave the Shooting stars Nursery with a firmly embedded sense of self, be able to communicate their thoughts, ideas, feelings, and knowledge and engender a lifelong love of learning, discovery, and literature.
We use the Development Matters non-statutory curriculum guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage (2021) to design an effective early year’s curriculum, and birth to 5 for SEN journal tracking system building on the strengths and meeting the needs of the children. The curriculum consists of everything we want our children to experience, learn and be able to do. We have developed our own progressive curriculum that ensures all children make progress during their journey with us. We have high expectations for all children and believe that with high quality education and learning, the correct support for all children will help to meet their full potential. Practitioners are facilitators to children’s learning, their role is to observe, support & extend learning, offer meaningful opportunities and experiences whilst listening to the child and tuning in their needs and interests.
Please see below for Shooting Stars Nursery Curriculum.
The seven areas of learning and development are:
Communication and Language
- Being able to make themselves understood.
- Understanding and following instructions.
- Developing good listening skills
- Being able to hold a conversation with friends and adults.
- Understanding ‘why’ questions.
- Enjoying stories and remembering much of what happened.
- Using talk to organise themselves in their play.
- Being able to articulate their thoughts, feelings, and ideas.
- Building up a broad vocabulary.
- Building children understanding with EAL children by using visual instruction cards
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
- Forming meaningful relationships with other children and adults
- Having respect for other people
- Being able to express and cope with feelings and emotions.
- Becoming independent and helping others
- Make choices and take responsibility.
- Learning appropriate behaviour
- Have feelings of wonder and joy
- Learning about festivals traditions and special occasions
- Learning about taking care of ourselves, cleaning our teeth, washing hands
- Learning about how to keep healthy by exercising and making good choices about food and drink.
Physical development
- Learning to gain control over our bodies – becoming more confident and independent in our movements.
- Use large muscle movements, climbing, throwing, mark making and waving streamers.
- Work with others to move objects and resources safely.
- Becoming independent regarding dressing, putting on coats.
- Express feelings through movement and music.
- Gaining skills and control over a variety of tools.
- Developing fine motor skills using a range of tools such as scissors, pens, and pencils.
Literacy
- Enjoying songs and rhymes
- Enjoy sharing books, with an adult and with friends.
- Enjoying listening to stories, with a book or orally.
- Using favourite stories in their play with others
- Noticing print in the environment and developing curiosity about its meaning
- Beginning to make marks to represent words.
- Begin to develop interest in letters and the sounds they represent.
- Begin to use some of their print and letter knowledge in their early writing – writing a shopping list etc.
Mathematics
- Developing counting behaviours –
1. counting in context
2. reciting numbers in order
- counting objects with 1-1 correspondence.
- Recognise numerals.
- Making marks to represent numbers/quantities.
- Naming shapes, 2D and 3D and using shapes appropriately.
- Recognising, creating, and extending patterns.
- Using positional language in play – in front, behind.
- Beginning to understand and explore language of measure – length, weight, and capacity.
Understanding the World
- Exploring the local environment
- Exploring and solving problems
- Finding out about the past
- Using a variety of technology in different ways to extend and develop the children’s knowledge and understanding.
- Making models using different materials and techniques
- Planning and designing models and play before making it.
- Understanding locality, travelling to other places.
- Looking at maps, routes, and distances.
Expressive arts and design.
- Joining in with songs and rhymes.
- Responding to music and rhythm through movement and dance.
- Exploring musical instruments and the sounds they make.
- Developing pretend play, based on their own real-life experiences.
- Experiment with different materials to make models and develop their ideas.
- Explore different media and techniques to create artwork.
- Experiment with colour mixing.
- Develop an interest in different types of creative works.
Although we plan from children’s interests and current stage of Learning and Development there are certain subjects/learning experiences we deliver to ensure we deliver a broad, ambitious, language rich, diverse and child centred curriculum.