What is the EYFS Early Years Foundation Stage

hello and welcome to little learners today we are going to be answering the question what is the early years foundation stage before we get started don't forget to click that like button if you find videos like this helpful and click the subscribe button to join the little learners family we're nearly at 200 000 subscribers so come and be part of that so this channel is based around the early years foundation stage or the eyfs but what exactly is it so the eyfs covers the age range birth to age five and it's all about the learning and development of children during that stage of their lives as many people already know when it comes to year one and above we follow the national curriculum or most places follow the national curriculum for the early years we follow the eyfs framework or the early years foundation stage framework this framework tells us what children need to be learning how they can learn that and how the different stages of development kind of progress throughout birth to five the whole idea of the early years is that children learn best by playing and exploring and so we don't have specific literacy maths history geography lessons like children do in year one and above instead we have continuous provision which is where we have lots of activities set up for children to help them with their development in all areas of learning and then they can access those in whatever way they want and adults can then help them to develop their skills in each area within the eyfs there are seven areas of development these are split up into three prime areas and four specific areas the idea behind this is that if children don't have skills in the prime areas then they're unable to access the specific areas let me explain bit more so the prime areas are communication and language so that's all about listening understanding speaking we then have physical development which of course is all about our movement our gross motor and fine motor skills and then we also have personal social and emotional development so that's all about self-regulation understanding yourself managing your own behavior and your own emotions understanding your emotions so children really need to develop skills in these areas first before they can move on to develop skills in these specific areas so the specific areas are literacy so that's our reading and writing and our comprehension we have maths which is of course our understanding of number and numerical patterns we have understanding the world which is pretty much what it says on the tin understanding the world around us the natural world people and communities around us and then we also have expressive arts and design which is all to do with creating with different media and materials and also being imaginative so you've got kind of that role play in there as well so we have all of these areas of learning and this is what we focus on in the early years or in the uifs child care settings who look after children from birth to age five have to follow the eyfs such settings might be nurseries child minders preschools kindergartens and reception classes in schools because the eyfs goes all the way until the end of the reception year so this can be bit confusing sometimes because children start school in reception but actually that's the final year of the eyfs which is why reception classes often look quite different to year one classes so hope that has given you bit of an overview of what the eyfs is have lots of other videos on this channel that go into more specifics and i'll link some in the description box below i'm also going to be releasing some more of these kind of quick overview videos so be sure to subscribe and click the bell icon so you get notified every time post video like this let me know in the comments below what you want to know about the early years so that can maybe put that into some videos in the future thank you so much for watching and will see you next time you