Introduction

Lydiate Primary provides education for children from the age of three years until the end of the foundation stage, where children are ready to enter Year 1. Our Early Years education spans Holly Nursery and Acorn Reception classes. 

Stained Shared Thinking Emotional Wellbeing (SSTEW)

At Lydiate Primary School, our participation in the Sefton Sustained Shared Thinking and Emotional Wellbeing (SSTEW) Project has significantly enriched our Early Years curriculum. This initiative, developed across Sefton, promotes high-quality adult-child interactions that support children's social, emotional, and communication skills.  

Through the SSTEW framework, our dedicated staff have engaged children in deep thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning, fostering critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration—essential life skills for the 21st century. This approach aligns seamlessly with our commitment to providing a rich and cohesive Early Years education that prepares children for future learning and success.   Our involvement in the SSTEW Project reflects our dedication to continuous improvement and excellence in Early Years education.

Life Long Learners 

At Lydiate Primary School, our engagement with the Sefton Life Long Learners Project has been a transformative journey, enhancing our commitment to lifelong learning. This initiative, led by Sefton's Early Years Team, supports schools and settings to reflect on current practice whilst considering the needs of our youngets learners in today's world. Through the project, our Early Years team have supported children to build their skills in independence, communication, resilience and problem-solving, whilst still promoting our fundamental goals of developing our children's wellbeing, concentration and play capaibiities. Our success in this project underscores our dedication to fostering a culture of continuous learning and development, ensuring that every member of our community has the tools and support needed to thrive in an ever-evolving world.

The Early Years Quality Mark

We are extremely proud of our foundation stage provision. Our Early Years department have achieved many awards and accreditations over the last few years, including a Quality Mark for Early Years, meaning that you can rest assured that your child will receive the very best care and provision as they take their first steps in compulsory education.  We are the only school in Sefton to have received this sought-after professional qualification. 

Our Provision

The award of the Quality Mark reflects the highest quality in indoor and outdoor continuous provision, learning and development, communication, interactions (including the key person approach) and leadership and management. You only have to set foot in the environment to experience for yourselves the quality. Calm, neutral colours provide an indoor backdrop for a range of areas - reading, writing, maths, science/curiosity, art, workshop, sand, water, malleable, role play, construction, small world - where children can develop as creative, active and independent learners, competent in a range of skills related to the seven areas of learning. Our outdoor areas are so much more than places to develop physically. Here, too, planting beds, role play sheds, small world jungles, digging zones and a range of large-scale construction and water items allow children to rise to challenges and develop their skills of teamwork, resilience and appreciation of the natural world.

Our Early Years Curriculum

Our careful planning of independent and adult-led activities develop children's vocabulary and bring children on every day in many different aspects of the curriculum. Each subject leader ensures that the roots of their subject starts within the Early Years, and this is reflected in our key learning documents for all subjects. Our Early Years children are budding scientists, athletes, geographers, historians, artists, technologists, musicians, computer scientists and linguists who have begun to develop a real empathy for the variety of life that surrounds them. 

The Seven Areas of Learning

The Early Years curriculum comprises seven areas of learning, and all are important. 

The areas of learning are:

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

We believe that every child should leave the foundation stage at Lydiate Primary being competent in the building blocks of Reading, Writing and Mathematics, so we provide a well-paced, challenging curriculum which emphasises the importance of these three aspects.

Reading & Writing

We follow the excellent 'Bug Club Phonics' scheme from Nursery, which rapidly introduces children to letters and sounds and ensures that they experience a range of inspiring, well-sequenced and progressive activities to develop their reading and writing skills. Our children read and write every day, meaning that they quickly become confident in applying their phonics. Reading has an extremely high profile throughout school. Children in both the Nursery and Reception have access to exciting reading areas, where they can read and browse a range of high-quality texts in cosy and inviting spaces, as well as visiting our beautiful library. We prioritise reading in the daily curriculum, starting with teaching reading for a short time each day and building up to providing an hour a day of reading experiences by the end of reception.

Writing has an equally high profile. In both settings, the children write every day. We practise letter formation and transfer phonics and reading skills into writing practice. We also provide multiple opportunities for writing across different aspects of the provision, e.g. shopping lists in the home corner or model designing in the construction area.

Maths

Our Maths curriculum is equally challenging. Daily Maths lessons and related activities ensure that children become fluent in recalling and using number facts and number bonds in calculation and are competent counters in a variety of contexts. We pride ourselves in our progression in mathematical reasoning. Even our youngest children learn to talk with ease about their maths work, using appropriate vocabulary and explaining how they solved problems.

Curriculum References

We use Development Matters to structure our learning, as well as bespoke progression maps for each of the seven areas of learning. Each of these progression maps leads towards the Early Learning Goals at the end of the reception year. Our learning is flexible, in response to a range of books studied, the needs and interests of the children and important events such as Divali. 

Please see below links to Development Matters, the Early Learning Goals and our progression maps for all seven areas of learning.

For more information about our Early Years curriculum, speak to Mrs Laycock (EYFS Lead), Miss Bradford (Reception Teacher) or Mrs Fielding-Huda (Nursery Teacher.)