In childcare terms, the time between a child’s birth and their fifth birthday is described as the Early Years Foundation Stage. This is a crucial time as it helps your child prepare for school as well as ongoing learning.
YMCA Day Nursery strives to support every family, ensuring that each child has the best possible start in life. During these vital few years, a child’s early years experience should be happy, active, exciting, fun and secure; and support their development, care and learning needs.
At a glance, daily activities within the nursery may appear to be all fun and games, but in actual fact, staff are constantly following the EYFS Framework and implementing practices that help further child development.
The Framework was created by parents and and numerous early years experts with a clear focus on 4 key areas:
- Legally, everyone registered to look after children must keep children safe and promote their welfare.
- Staff should follow the 7 areas of learning and development which guide professional engagement with a child’s play and activities as they learn new skills and knowledge.
- Regular assessments should be carried out to track a child’s progress through the EYFS.
- By the age of 5, each child should reach expected levels of the “Early learning Goals.”
So in short, how does YMCA Day Nursery deliver on these expectations?
YMCA Day Nursery makes sure that each child is as safe as possible. Within the EYFS there is a set of welfare standards that everyone must follow. These include the numbers of staff required in a nursery and things like administering medication and carrying out risk assessments.
The Nursery has robust policies, procedures and risk assessments in place which form a safe environment for every child placed in their care to be safe, secure and happy.
They follow and implement the Early Years Foundation stage and characteristics of Effective Learning as a core element of their curriculum to help promote children’s learning and development, with the belief that all children are unique therefore learn and develop as individuals and at their own pace
YMCA Day Nursery’s approach is to work closely with parents and carers to ensure each child has the best possible start to their development. Every child is appointed a key worker who is the first point of call should there be any concerns about how a child is progressing at nursery. Every key worker will upload observations to Tapestry to show how each child is progressing and each room has “wow birds” to record what a child may have done for the first time or if they have been trying to develop a new skill.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be delving into the framework a little deeper and providing more insight into how the Early Years Foundation Stages help shape the nursery’s approach to every day interactions with children, providing them with the best support possible so that they can belong, contribute and thrive to their full potential.
To find out more about the North Shields based Nursery, Get in touch here
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