Policy: Our Baby Programme (0-2 yr olds)

Our babies are in what Piaget refers to as the “sensorimotor stage” of cognitive development. The major characteristics and developmental changes found within this period focus in and around the baby’s interaction with his / her immediate environment and the key person who provides love, care and attention. Infants at this age are intensely subject to attachment, as per Mary Ainsworth’s “secure base” theory, Bowlby’s views on attachment theory and Winnecotts Theory on a “good enough mother” and are the very reason why our Key Person system is intended to provide children with an intense bond during their time with us in school.

The primary developmental areas for this age group are what the EYFS refers to as the 3 Primes. They are known as Communication & Language, Physical Development and Personal, Social & Emotional Development in the EYFS and they are the foundations from which all future learning can spring. If children are happy, self-confident and communicative learners, who understand their bodies and how to navigate their environments well and can manage their feelings and behaviour in the context of their relationships with other people, then we’ve achieved the basis from which our preschool curriculum can spring. Let’s have a look at each area in detail...

Communication & Language

Communication & Language is the underpinning of the child’s entire educational experience with us - it allows him / her to comprehend, be communicative and confidently engage in new aspects of learning. Despite the fact that babies are preverbal it is widely known to be the most important age for us to establish communicative abilities through regular interaction, song, rhyme, stories and engagement. By commenting on what children are interested in or doing, and echoing back what they say with new vocabulary added, practitioners will build children's language effectively.

Our staff focus on a simple pedagogical principle in this age group: “Talk & Sing” using our own bilingual song book and bilingual story compendium to further regular music, rhyme and narrative in the lives of our children. 

We try to immerse children in a musically and linguistically rich environment as there is evidence that not only bilingual immersion but music can confer cognitive advantages in early stage development (Schellenberg 2005)

If you would like to learn more about the linguistic genius of babies, check our Prof Kuhl’s talk on TED here

We focus on the McArthur Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories (CDIS) for Words & Gestures, at this age (8-18 months), moving into “Words & Sentences” towards the end of their time in the baby room to achieve, broadly, what we hope will be acquisitive rates in line with monolingual children outlined below, with the caveats of “conceptual vocabularies” outlined above.

Milestones & Markers:

• At 6 months: your baby should be responding to familiar voices, turning around at the sound of their own name and make regular babbling noises
• At 12 months: your baby will start using single words, pointing at things and making gestures to you and your key person at school to express interest in a basic attempt at communicating. He / she will start using basic words like “mama” and be able to choose between objects when offered a choice. 
• At 15 months: your baby should be able to say 5-10 words (not clearly) but they might be emerging
• At 18 months: your toddler will listen and respond to simple instructions like “please put on your shoes” and will start trying to speak with c 10-20 words in his / her vocabulary that are spoken, with comprehension of a larger volume of single and two-word phrases. 
• By 2 years: your child should master up to 25-50 words and start structuring simple sentences and should be able to understand up to 350, including describing words, prepositional phrases, time phrases, pronoun use and simple questions. 

See here for our target word lists for Babies & Toddlers

Personal, Social & Emotional Development

Helping children develop their self-confidence and social awareness in the context of their relationships with other adults and children is a fundamental part of what we do. Learning to make friends, establish boundaries and manage our own feelings and behaviour is a critical part of socialising the child and one of the primary advantages of a nursery school over, say a childminder or nanny. 

Here we replicate the attachment that Ainsworth and Bowlby advise are fundamental to the long term psycho-social development of the child. It is the time where we instill in them a sense of self-belief: that they can do and with a little gentle encouragement, overcome and achieve. We regularly have joint activities and circle times in which we share, pass toys and learn to accommodate the needs and wishes of others. Maintaining small ratios of 1 key person to every 3 children allows for greater intimacy and attachment.

Milestones & Markers:

• At 7 months, we’re looking for social awareness: baby is responding to his / her own name when called and is sensitive to the emotions communicated in speech
• At 12 months: This awareness extends to being cognisant of those who are familiar and those who are not, the attachment to key person and parent is manifest and the Strange Situation Experiment becomes apparent: this is perfectly normal, natural and healthy
• At 18 months, the toddler should be both mobile and curious about his / her environment, exploring the areas of the setting and the resources within it in full. 
• At 2, your child should start seeing themselves as a separate person with their own desires and wishes that need to be fulfilled. You may start seeing tantrums appearing, which is the child realising what he / she wants and desires to enforce it (often without the words to communicate, which can be very frustrating!)

Physical Development

Physical activity is vital in children’s all-round development, enabling them to pursue happy, healthy and active lives. Gross and fine motor experiences develop incrementally throughout early childhood, starting with sensory explorations and the development of a child’s strength, coordination and positional awareness through tummy time, crawling and play movement with both objects and adults. By creating games and providing opportunities for play both indoors and outdoors, adults can support children to develop their core strength, stability, balance, spatial awareness, coordination and agility. Gross motor skills provide the foundation for developing healthy bodies and social and emotional well-being. Fine motor control and precision helps with hand-eye coordination which is later linked to early literacy. Repeated and varied opportunities to explore and play with small world activities, puzzles, arts and crafts and the practice of using small tools, with feedback and support from adults, allow children to develop proficiency, control and confidence

Milestones & Markers:

• At around 12 months, we’re looking for baby to stand up and sit down, pick up something with his / her finger and thumb

• By 2 we’re looking for fully mobile toddlers who can run, kick a ball, jump with both feet off the ground and start climbing, catching and possibly pedalling small trikes 

Other Areas

We also start introducing the foundations of the 4 specifics of the EYFS: literacy, numeracy, Expressive Arts & Design and Understanding the World into the baby programme. But know that such activities and interests are foundational:

• Literacy: we do not expect children to start reading or writing in this age group but through regular story time and with access to art materials for them to develop mark making skills (proto-writing) and the physical dexterity required to hold a pen and pencil, we are setting the basis from which literacy skills in reading and writing will emerge through preschool.
• Numeracy: Again this is not the age for alien concepts like numbers. Rather we try to develop a sense of time, space, existence, volume, shape and measure: removing objects and having them reappear helps children develop the sense of existence and “more” and “less” / “heavy’ and ‘light”; basic puzzles and blocks build awareness of shape and the interaction of shapes; water play can help develop a sense of volume (outside of being a lot of fun). And as the children get towards the age of two they might count up to 5 in counting rhymes and songs and more...but we leave the more computational side of numeracy to preschool
• Understanding the World: Children in our baby room are focussed on developing intimate relationships with their key person, their friends and understanding the immediacy of their environment: family and the relationships between them. They will learn to grasp the difference between mummy and daddy, brother and sister and various family members, as they will other people in society. They will understand the concept of home, of school as two distinct places and the travel required between the two. But beyond this, we don’t go further - we need to establish the child’s sense of place in the world. And for that, we need to focus on what is near. 
• Expressive Arts & Design: We start seeing children enjoy music, art and expression. Using media and materials in their play to test out texture, taste and smell and looking for noises and sensory opportunities in the play they undertake. 

Characteristics of Effective Learning (CoEL)

• Playing & Exploring - We’re looking for the children to realise that their actions have an effect on the world, so they want to keep repeating them. That they reach for and accept objects and can explore different resources and materials independently. In doing so, they are planning ahead and thinking about which objects to play with and are guiding their own thinking by their actions.  
• Active Learning - We’re looking for children to participate in routines, proactively, and begin to predict sequences because they know routines such as tidying up or washing hands and lunch or outings. They might demonstrate goal-directed behaviour - working hard to get what they want (e.g toys out of a box) 
• Creating and thinking critically - We want children to take part in pretend play, to imagine actions like drinking or eating or brushing hair that they’re mimicking from their parents / key person. We want them to sort, place and organise and recognise objects by similarity.

Baby Room Routines

We maintain a very loose structure for our baby room. The focus of our programme is in continuous provision / explorative play - utilising the environment and the wonderful resources within it to develop curiosity and confidence in the way they engage with their space. The Key Person is there to guide, nurture and encourage, constantly interacting with your child to help him / her develop further in their cognitive and linguistic abilities. 

We do have some structure: meal and snack times are always preceded by washing of hands and tidying up, principles which we think should be embedded in behaviour as early as possible. Outings are arranged and we may time table special “Wow” moments like music class or story time to gradually introduce the concept of routine and structure to their day. But we do not want to interrupt their play or their purpose in their play. Ever.