At Sherwood Green Nursery our vision is to provide a happy, caring, secure, safe and stimulating environment where children are at the heart of everything that happens at nursery.

Our curriculum aim is to enable all children to develop their capabilities as successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors to society. We aim to help all children to prepare for the future.

Our goal is to insert strong foundations in the EYFS together with the characteristics of effective teaching and learning, as well as ethical and spiritual development so that our children are happy and curious lifelong learners.

Our curriculum is consequently the cultural capital, we know what our curious little learners need so that they can gain the knowledge, understanding and skills to succeed moving throughout their nursery journey. Children experiences within the nursery that provide awe and wonder based on their individuals interests and continuously teaching them all about what life has to offer in a play-based environment.
We recognise and value individual’s strengths and talents and believe in praising effort and valuing the little steps that really make a difference to a child’s progress. We know that by doing this, we are building happy and secure children, who feel safe. Praise and clear boundaries contribute to the confidence and resilience of our children. Creating children who are independent, not only in their organisational skills but also in their learning, is a high priority for us. We believe that all children are intrinsically capable ofamazing things and we develop this through having high expectations of all children based on their complex needs and backgrounds.

We pose challenges, build confidence and self-esteem, show children how capable they are and support them to reach their potential. We take time to teach independence skills explicitly and support children to develop into well-rounded, ambitious learners. Taking risks is an important part of learning and wehave developed both our environments and our teaching and learning strategies to promote children measuring and assessing risks for themselves and in having confidence and resilience to attempt challenges. Confidence and resilience are key skills for a developing learner. We explicitly teach children to understand the learning process and understand mistakes are valuable learning experiences.

Perseverance is highly valued and praised. We strongly believe that in order to develop resilience, we must teach children to be independent learners who problem solve for themselves and know to keep trying and how and when to access help. Excitement and motivation for learning are developed through planning fun, engaging and challenging lessons based on the needs for the children. We provide new and interesting experiences, building on and adding to the range of activities children will have had at home or through pre-school experience. We make learning purposeful and rooted in real-life contexts, where possible, so that children have motivating reasons to learn and to help them to apply their knowledge to a range of situations.

 A language rich environment is vital and this is what we strive for within our settings.

Our Curriculum main key standards are:

• Happy, secure and feel safe environment.
• Socially strong and able to form positive relationships.
• Our curriculum will encourage curiosity and engagement.
• Our curriculum is child-led and adult-led
• Our curriculum is strongly linked to the environment and the community
• Our curriculum is literacy rich
• Our curriculum aim is to ensure children are independent risk takers, confident and resilient.
• Our curriculum is accessible to all

How we implement our curriculum

How do we teach what we teach?

At Sherwood Green the pedagogy we follow is ‘The Curiosity Approach’. We use this to implement our curriculum and provide a sense of curiosity, awe, and wonder. The curriculum is planned for indoors and outdoors, aims to give children back their freedom by igniting their natural curiosity and imagination. When adopting this teaching method, children are able to think for themselves, make their own choices, and direct their own learning.
At Sherwood Green we provide a balance of child-initiated activities carefully thought out from their individual interests and learning structures, and purpose built activities which are created to engage and challenge the children in many different ways.
We meet the needs of all our children through planning opportunities that build upon and extend children’s knowledge, experience and develop their independence and confidence.
Our practitioners, then expertly support ‘In the moment’ to further improve and maintain their individual learning needs based on the 7 areas of the EYFS.
At Sherwood Green we believe that knowing more words makes you smarter. Which is why reading books is at the forefront of our teaching as this will really help progress all the children’s learning.
We promote high quality interaction with the children so through regularengagement we can deliver a high quality of teaching.

The Impact Our Curriculum Has On Our Children

What have our children learnt and how well they have learnt it?

We believe that every child is unique and they all have the potential to achieve. Ensuring we are meeting the standards and needs of all our children including EAL, SEND, Disadvantaged, Pupil Premium and small groups of children can be met within the environment of high quality first teaching, supported by targeted interventions where appropriate. In this way is can be seen to be impacting in a very positive way on children’s outcomes.
Ensuring we are meeting the standards and needs of our children including our disadvantaged children including SEND.
Our early year practitioners use their observations/assessments to identify the children’s starting points, and plan experiences and bespoke activities to ensure progress. Evidence of the children’s progress, which includes written observations, videos and photos and separately contributions from
parents/carers are recorded on a child’s journey via our Parent Educational Blossom App and linked to the the seven areas of the EYFS. Our practitioners use this data to then assess the impact of learning by liaising with other staff members and this helps them create future actions plans.