Intent

At Shalom Noam Primary School we recognise and celebrate that each child is unique and comes to us with a range of different experiences. Our provision supports the strong Jewish Values of our families, whilst opening up the world to our children and helping them see beyond their own experiences. We do this through a Power of Reading model with books at the heart of our teaching and individual experiences as an outgrowth. We believe that by promoting books, we will encourage the children to develop a love of learning and become independent learners. Our curriculum has a strong flexible element as we assess and understand what the children need to progress and what their interests are.

It is important that we value the strong Jewish background, culture and traditions our children come from, whilst teaching them respect, tolerance and understanding as well as all British Values.

We make sure that we know every child as an individual and work closely with parents and families so that children at Shalom Noam remain at the centre of our curriculum. At Shalom Noam, we follow the Early Years Curriculum (September 2021). This is based on Development Matters, the government’s non-statutory curriculum guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage. There are seven areas of learning which we cover:

• personal, social and emotional development.
• communication and language.
• physical development.
• literacy.
• mathematics.
• understanding the world.
• expressive arts and design.

Implementation

We implement the Early Years curriculum through a balance of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic resources. We create play based learning and create topics around children’s interests, incorporating Jewish festivals and values. Children have secure and effective relationships with the adults in our Nursery and Reception and this supports children giving them the confidence to explore new concepts and take part in new experiences.

They develop their confidence and love of learning by exploring their interests, skills and knowledge through high quality continuous provision, both indoor and outdoor and carefully planned guided activities. Children make progress with the support of sensitive guidance from adults in nursery and reception and we adapt provision to meet the needs of our children.

We love books and choose core texts in a cross curricular way to stimulate children’s learning. We also have a balance of child initiated and guided activities, whole class carpet sessions for shared learning. Phonics is taught daily regularly and we ensure our daily phonics sessions are fun, interactive and memorable and that new learning is supported and consolidated in the continuous provision.

We teach children how to manage their emotions through support from adults who are invested in their wellbeing and linked to topics. We adapt our continuous provision to reflect and support our children and their needs and emotions.

We quickly identify areas of development or need in children’s learning and adapt our provision to meet their needs. This is done through general observation and tracking on Target Tracker.

We identify children with needs and provide early interventions when necessary and we identify children’s individual skills and extend them.

Impact

Our children move on from Early Years with skills and school readiness they need for Year 1 and beyond. We aspire for all children to achieve GLD and make good individual progress in all of the seven areas. The children will have a strong knowledge of their culture and traditions, form positive relationships, recognise and understand boundaries and initiate their own experiences, create and solve problems, experiment with ways of using equipment and materials, practise and refine skills and have good reading, writing and maths skills as well as to communicate well and talk about what they have learned and their experiences. They develop on their journey to becoming independent learners with a strong love of learning.