The Early Years Foundation Stage

A framework was designed and developed and came into action on 13 March 2007 and forced into action by September 2008 and is called as EYFS i.e. Early Years Foundation Stage This framework has revolutionised the learning methods and is a framework for the enhancing learning, care and improving the skills and development of children in all the spheres of life when they are in a age group of 0 to 5 years.

The Early Years Foundation Stage Profile was the new name for the Foundation Stage Profile from September 2008 with its content remaining as such.

Mainly 6 stages are there in EYFS for Learning and Development. This is equally important and is usually connected to one another. These stages of Learning and Development are collaborated inside the rules listed for EYFS.

The various areas where Development and Learning could be enhanced are:

Development in personal ,social and emotional spheres

Communication

Solving and Reasoning capacity of children

Understanding the surroundings and grasping knowledge from surroundings.

Development enhancing physical strength

Development enhancing creative strength

Most of the review conducted on the Primary Curriculum and other independent Cambridge Primary Review has highlighted the requirement to re-think and remodel the children’s educational experiences provided in English classrooms for students between the age’s group of five and seven.

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Recently government initiative has provided new experiences. In early primary years education being adult directed and conducted generally in whole-class groups, in a small place for playing and should be self-initiated learning. This is familiar in Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) which controls the education of children from birth to five years.

This discontinuous pedagogy has resulted in concerns at levels like national and local levels. This study describes the complete efforts put in by teachers in one English local authority for developing practice in respective classrooms which generally is less formal and more teacher-led and desires more to the requirements and interests children in age group of 0 to 5 years. It explains the reasons for participation of teachers in this project, new difficulties and hurdles faced and the result and understanding for both teachers and children.

Discussion

PERSONAL, SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Care is taken for the children’s development with a positive attitudes and good behaviour. Individual attention is given to every child with love and care. For listening and talking, children are provided an opportunity. They share their toys and work together on activities. Children should be praise for their success by rewarding their positive behaviour and good manners. Children must be shared with experiences which will develop positive sense that will help them in interacting with surroundings; giving respect to their teachers and parents; social skills; the attitude which will allow them to gain knowledge. Adults should give children opportunities for interaction with others so that children can grasp positive ideas from society they live in.

When closed relationships are explored it generally leads to the growth of self-assurance thus it leads to promoting sense of belongingness that helps in children to explore the environment surrounding in them in a more secured way.

Children must be encouraged for freely expressing their thoughts and their ideas, their emotions like sadness, frustration, joy and fear and can also develop means of managing new challenges and stressful conditions.

COMMUNICATION, LANGUAGE AND LITERACY

Every child should talk to each other in small groups for development of extended vocabulary and better communication skills. They go through the books and rhymes through the tapes and books for re enactment of the plays. They use word games, phonics, alphabets and play all around for the written language. Children there mark marking so that they can improve their hand and eye coordination which will help in writing when they grow older.

Generally children use the language learnt for sharing and expressing their experiences. Their actions represent their thinking and how they react to events which we called as their language of thinking. Children over the time gather understanding about spoken sounds and they learn how to link different sounds and use gained knowledge writing and reading simple words. Young Child is in company of people whom they love and respect and loving relationships for e.g. family group situation, a person on which they have trust. Generally babies respond differently to every sound easily distinguish different sound patterns. Children use voices for making contact and letting people understand what is needed and what their feelings are. Once children develop skills of speaking their foundations for education is built and using the visual signs and finally preparing for reading and writing. They need to be given opportunities for working with others and exposure to resources for enhancing their knowledge like reading and writing.

PROBLEM SOLVING, REASONING AND NUMERACY

As we can see parents and teachers shall support the children for developing their understanding in solving Problem, developing a Reasoning and numerical aptitude using this they can easily find, learn and enjoy and understanding their environment. Children’s mathematical development occurs as they find patterns, make connections and remember relationships through searching out and working on counts and number matching and further sorting of accounts by comparing size, shape and measures. This derived skill is used by children to solve problems, ask new questions and make connections across different areas of Learning and Development. While talking about shapes and quantity, children use their knowledge and experience to develop ideas and to solve mathematical and other problems.

KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD

Usually the life of child consists of learning the world that is around an individual. They talk of all things like how different things work and explaining for the reason why a particular thing occurred enjoy cooking and playing with clay. Generally they find all around the experience for natural world with wide range of seasons to hunt mini beasts. Children elaborate further the water, building and sand for construction own world of imagination. Babies and children need opportunities to understand means of life, methods giving correct information developing an attitude which keeps them positive in all condition and have a understanding behaviour for others. Children must be given help so that they can learn how to respect and keep the values of elders and understanding the need to avoid negative attitudes towards others

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

Children should be given a very healthy life style including rest, exercise, and eating healthy food. These children shall be given balanced food to encourage them in spending time to outside location daily. Children develop good hygiene practices like washing hands after toilet usage and before meal. Usually good and well being in physical strength allows children to enjoy the positive benefits provided by keeping themselves active and healthy. Babies gain by being active and the development takes place all along the areas thus resulting in gaining in confidence in what they can do and develop a positive sense of well-being.

CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT

Creative Development means to explore with art and craft activities which include draw, paint, construct, stick as well as print largely. Children are very imaginative and thus can create their own pretending world. They love being chef working in kitchens, or sometimes working at bench for carpenter role. They love music making along with various instruments, rhymes and songs. Creativity develops children to gain experiences from their own explorations of surroundings, and expressing their feelings using different movements or by making things with the help of different materials existing in surroundings. Creativity helps children in exploring many functions for e.g. materials and media for creating new things which come out as a result. Children’s always react to their surroundings i.e. their experiences of watching, listening, experiences gathered using their sense organs and the manner in which they provide experiences is unique and valuable. Children learn in variety of ways and all have different interests so proper planning should be done for every child. Observation must be taken on baby to plan the best possible learning opportunities.

For all children learning starts from birth. The EYFS is helpful for practitioners to enable right experience of play for children in development of all set of possibilities. It will enable practitioners to find your child’s strengths and areas they want greater help for developing new skills, while for newly born babies this is crucial factor to make one feel comfortable all around it. This can be further aided with key person’s role in settings that result in knowing positive relations of child.

As per EYFS, the place where a child is cared to get an education for the age till five years, it uses similar principles, and is provided with principled approach for development and learning. These babies at inception stage gains a lot by the way of plays and the practitioners treat them in a way to make them learn the plays at stages for support and development of new skill set. All of the arenas are equivalent in importance with number of activities to cover number of areas to divide each of them in various stages and the practitioners can detect the sources for development and better operational activities performance.

METHODOLOGY

The methodology was made to identify how children perceive their experiences of a range of early year’s settings, and to provide information an understanding of the effectiveness and limitations of the EYFS in setting a play-based and participative approach to learning.

The qualitative research design was formed around the four EYFS principles and the related themes and commitments2 (DCSF, 2008a, p9):

A Unique Child (Child Development, Inclusive Practice, Health and Well Being).

Positive Relationship which means respecting teachers and class fellows etc.

Enabling Environment (Observation, Assessment, Planning, Support).

Learning and Development (Active Learning, Areas of Learning and Development).

According to Mosaic approach (Clarke and Moss, 2001) and participatory rural appraisal techniques (O’Kane, 2000), a verity of participative activities with children were designed to correlate with each of these 4 broad themes and to address the 4 commitments within each one.

A sample of 15 case study settings selected from across 4 Local Authorities drawn from 2 government regions in north England. It comprise of 2 children’s centres, 2 reception classes, 3 maintained nursery classes, 2 private nurseries, 1 voluntary sector setting, 1 independent school, one out-of-school setting, 4 childminders and 1 Steiner kindergarten. The sample was selected to include children growing up in urban and rural areas of social advantage and deprivation, and ethnical different communities. Children in both full day-care and sessional care are included. 146 children achieved the aim to represent a vast range of children except in relation to sampling disabled children.

Research activities, based on the EYFS themes, were designed to incorporate a different strategy for promoting talk between researchers and children to explore:

Unique Child – how good early years settings acts to the uniqueness and difference of children.

A Positive Relationships – how children view the importance of their relationships with close ones and with practitioners.

Enabling Environment – how children responds early years settings and the extent to which these provide them with good opportunities.

Learning and Development – It is very important as children’s response and thinking about learning and development in their settings is developed.

To gather knowledge about how well early years settings were responding to the uniqueness and difference of children, a 1 to 1 activity was used, to generate a digital picture book called ‘My Best Day’, which is based on the child’s best day in a setting. Alongside this we collect information about children’s relationship within settings by using an adaptation of a floor based graphical or visual mapping game. To collect information about how children respond the environment of their setting, an adaptation of the Mosaic approach ‘tour’ devised. Finally, to collect information about children’s experiences of learning and development, we used data of children’s learning, and called as ‘Learning Journeys’, which prompts to conversation. Participant experiences were also undertaken with each child or small groups of children.

Presentation of data

In the seven key scales of Personal, Social & Emotional development (PSE) and Communication,

Language and Literacy (CLL):

• 61.1 percent of girls achieved 6 or more points in every the scales, this compares to 42.8% of boys, a difference of 18.3 % points. This difference has increased since 2008 when it was 17.3 % points.

The chart below provides information about the percentage of pupils and their development in each of these 7 key scales.

Figure below shows details on EYFS conducted in PSE and CLL scales in the year 2009.

24.7 % of boys are classified as being the lowest achieving 20 % of pupils

, this compares to 15.1 % for girls. These percentages have been relatively stable since 2007.

Conclusion

Most of the study suggests for early years practitioners said that: ‘effective early years practitioners will define the time and relevant activities which are useful in a space in daily routine of life to reflect. This daily schedule will be responsible for the well being of children and they will also gain knowledge. This report aims to present proofs of that combination in various early years’ settings from children’s views. Thereby, the aim is also to gain insight into children’s perspectives of their own well-being and learning in those cases.

Studies have shown that children must be encouraged for freely expressing their thoughts and their ideas, their emotions like sadness, frustration, joy and fear and can also develop means of managing new challenges and stressful conditions. Closed relationships were explored it and its learning led to the growth of self-assurance thus it leads to promoting sense of belongingness that helps in children to explore the environment surrounding in them in a more secured way.

Although many of the proofs reported here are set with themes, commitments and guidance in the EYFS, it was also known that there are omissions in the EYFS, in part as a result of emphasis laid on children since the end benefits of a this daily schedule called curriculum generated by adults. The theme of children taking care is one such omission which we have pointed to as evident in children’s clear need to engage with the world around them, to show the know how they have about their surroundings and to maintain a category of types of relationships.

The 6 areas of Learning and Development together enhance and improve their skills, experiences and improve their knowledge as this is a important aspect for children during their growth.

These are presented as different areas which include remembering that the entire tasks link together for children and none of these shall be compartmentalized.

The problem faced by most of the practitioners is to confirm whether the learning of children’s is an output of their individual interests in planning for learning and development takes place.