The prime areas act as the foundations for the rest of a child’s development and learning. They are fundamental to a child’s ability to learn and form relationships, as well as for their general wellbeing – so these will be the areas adults focus on when working with the youngest children, up to 3 years of age. At around the age of 3 years, as children become increasingly competent in the three prime areas, they need to build, develop and broaden their skills. The four specific areas aim to do this through literacy, mathematics, understanding the world, and expressive arts and design. Confidence in the prime areas will provide a platform for successful learning in these wide, …show more content…
Children learn in different ways by doing different things. The EYFS identifies these types of learning as:
• Playing and exploring
• Active learning
• Creating and thinking critically
These characteristics are part of the EYFS profile assessment, so adults need to show that they understand them in their work with children.
4.1 – the EYFS outcomes
In 2013 the Department for Education produced a simplified document, Early Learning Outcomes, highlighting all the outcomes we want children to achieve before they enter Key Stage One of the National Curriculum. These outcomes are a guide to help practitioners support children’s development to reach the early learning goals – a statutory requirement for each child at the end of the school years in which they are 5.
The early year’s outcomes are defined by the areas of learning and are listed in specific age bands. The age bands overlap, this is because children develop at their own pace and in their own ways. The typical behaviour statements and the order in which the outcomes appear are not necessary steps for individual children.
Area of learning Outcomes areas
Language and communication • Listening and attention
• Understanding
• Speaking
Physical development • Moving and …show more content…
It is also important to plan appropriate activities to meet the child’s interests to develop the areas identified.
There are a number of ways to evaluate a child’s progress, and these are:
• Ongoing assessment on a daily basis that informs planning of activities or child’s individual planning for the next day.
• Sharing observations with colleagues and talking about individual children’s progress and how they could be specifically supported in an area of their development.
• Sharing observations with parents through talking about children’s progress as evident in their learning journal, sharing video clips of similar activities from home and school and asking parents to contribute their own observations.
• Ensuring that observations are carried out on the environment to see if it is enabling children’s progress in specific areas, such as having access to a range of blocks and small-world play.
• Regularly reviewing the progress of summative assessment such as the early learning goals to see if there are areas of a child’s development that needs to be focused