Tapestry and the EY Curriculum
The Early Years curriculum can often be the most difficult part of a child's education for parents to fully understand. We hope that the information below will help you in understanding your child's first few years of their school life.
The Early Learning Goals
The Early Years curriculum aims to help children meet seventeen early learning goals (ELGs) spread across a range of seven broad areas. These are:
Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED)
Communication and Language (CL)
Physical Development (PD)
Literacy (L)
Maths (M)
Knowledge and Understanding of the World (KUW) - this covers early versions of History, Geography and ICT
Expressive Arts and Design (EAD) - this covers early versions of Art, Music and Drama
The focus throughout the Early Years is on the first of these three, though all seven are seen as important.
As your children work towards these goals, they advance through different overlapping age bands or phases, gaining increasing mastery before moving up to the next age band and eventually the ELG. It is worth remembering that not all children gradually increase in ability and many will have a short period of seeming stagnation before demonstrating a rapid period of development. The age bands the children will move through within the Foundation 1 year are normally:
22-36 months
30-50 months
40-60 months
You can see the age bands are very large and some cover nearly a period of two years, so the process from emerging to developing and finally secure can take some time.
This is only a brief overview of our curriculum and if you do want more detail you are always welcome to come in and talk to us. All our teachers are passionate about the Early Years and would be happy to share with you!
Tapestry
Obviously within the Early Years environment we do not expect children to be sitting down and writing all the time. Instead Early Years practitioners document the learning of our children through regular observations of them. These may take the form of written observations, photos, videos or a combination of the three.
Tapestry is an online platform that provides an easy tool to perform these observations as well as a secure environment to store them in. However its main advantage is that it allows you as parents (and anyone else you choose such as grandparents) to be involved in your child's learning journey. You can see all the observations that we have taken of your child, comment on them and even upload observations of your own for us to see.
When you log on to Tapestry you will be able to see your child's learning journal and read any observations that have been made. On each of these observations you will have a comment from the teacher detailing what happened in the learning experience. You will usually also have a photo or video and an assessment letting you know which ELG or ELGs the experience was working towards and at what age band the child was working at during that event.
We find Tapestry to be an amazing tool, both in it's ability to help us provide the best education possible to your children and also in letting you have a more in depth knowledge of what your children are doing when they are at school. As always, if you have any questions or technical problems with Tapestry then please come and see us.
