Understanding the World Curriculum

Hungerford Nursery School Centre for Children and Families

Everyone Matters – Be the Best you can be –

All Learn: All Lead: All Achieve

Understanding the World 

The EYFS 2021 states that the educational programmes must involve activities and experiences for children as set out under the area of learning:

"Understanding the world involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community. The frequency and range of children’s personal experiences increases their knowledge and sense of the world around them – from visiting parks, libraries and museums to meeting important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters. In addition, listening to a broad selection of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems will foster their understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world. As well as building important knowledge, this extends their familiarity with words that support understanding across domains. Enriching and widening children’s vocabulary will support later reading comprehension."

Intent of Understanding the World Curriculum

We aim to ensure that we celebrate and recognise the important times in our children’s lives and their families. We wish to offer enriched experiences of the wider world and celebrate diverse beliefs and values, promoting respect and tolerance of other cultures. Our purpose is to support children to explore the world around them, looking closely at the changes in the seasons, their local environment and beyond and in living things. We aspire to ‘Kindle their Curiosity’ to immerse the children in an environment that is enquiry-led by their interests and natural curiosity, where they solve problems, investigate, make decisions and experiment. We will provide opportunities to work with and use modern technology to support learning.

Implementation of Understanding the World Curriculum

• We follow children’s interests to make links in their learning and connections to the wider world
• We provide exciting, active learning environments that build strong foundations for the development of understanding the world.
• We provide a range of stimulating resources and shape the learning environment to enhance real life opportunities for developing skills in understanding people, communities, the World and the technology within our World.
• Staff/child interaction extends children’s learning and enhances sustained shared thinking and checks for any misconceptions.
• In every area of the nursery, throughout the day staff ask a range of questions and use open-ended questions to encourage children to share their ideas, explain their thinking, describe things around them and make reasoned evaluations.
• Our staff plan for and respond to the child’s individual next steps in relation to Understanding the World and other areas of the curriculum in the moment and during their weekly planning.
• Staff ensure there are appropriate resources at all times to challenge, stimulate, and offer provocation.
• We carefully select appropriate resources for all our workshops in relation to Understanding the World ensuring that we have a wide selection of equipment/resources to support their development in this area, including a range of musical instruments, books, role play crockery and dressing up etc.
• Cooking experiences to understand changes and healthy food
• Providing real life experiences such as observing eggs and minibeasts life cycles, growing plants, alongside exploring mud kitchens and going to ‘Forest School’ to understand the wider world about them
• We ensure that within the environment there are examples of books from a range of occupations, and cultures