Education at every stage: Early Years Development at Dallington School, a British School in Parque Conde de Orgaz, Arturo Soria, Madrid.
Early Years schooling is an extremely important time in a child´s development, as it represents their introduction to formal education and encourages them to develop a wide range of both social and academic skills. At Dallington School British School, we follow the UK´s Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, which is organised into seven key areas. The prime areas include personal, social and emotional development (PSED), Physicial Development and Communication and Language.
PSED focuses on forming good relationships with peers and adults, self-confidence and awareness and managing their own feelings and behaviour. Physical development helps gross motor skills including running, balancing and coordination skills and the fine motor skills necessary for writing. Communication and language skills are developed through speaking, understanding and listening using songs, poems and classroom circle times to increase their exposure to language. The four remaining specific areas cover literacy, maths, understanding the world and expressive arts and design.
At Dallington School, as well as making sure that we plan for all these seven areas we also place great importance on the idea that every child is unique and has an individual way of learning, by understanding how the child learns more than just what they learn. These characteristics of effective learning underpin all the daily activities both in and out of the classroom. We strive for the children to independently discover and explore, to keep on trying when faced with difficulties and to change strategy if needed to accomplish their goals. By offering a range of activities that cater to all of the multiple intelligences, our teachers provide the children with different ways to process the learning being taught. Be it through images, music and song, by actions, reasoning or language to name but a few the children are exposed to a variety of tasks and can approach these with motivation and interest.
Melissa Field
EYFS Lead Teacher
