The school is being proactive in offering more targeted opportunities to ensure the students have the best chances to accelerate and secure learning in key areas.
PARTNER CONTENT: Heather Threlfall, Assistant Head of Primary at The British International School Abu Dhabi, on how Early Years Additional Sessions ensure firm foundations are in place to help propel students on their learning journey throughout the school years.
Since the start of the academic year 2022/23, The British International School Abu Dhabi has been implementing the Early Years Additional Sessions programme, or EYAS, which translates to ‘young falcon’.
The EYAS programme arose from educational professionals’ concerns regarding the potential impact on students from the pandemic. Students of this age group had spent the majority of their young lives indoors with little social interaction and had limited opportunities to develop their personal, social and communication skills.
Consequently, the British International School Abu Dhabi wanted to be proactive in offering more targeted opportunities to ensure the students joining school had the best chances to accelerate and secure learning in these key areas.
Early Years Additional Sessions, which is provided at no extra cost for parents, offers additional support at a time when a window of opportunity for the development of Early Years students is key; the brains of students aged under five are wired to learn more and their communication and language development is radical within this small yet important time frame.
The implementation of EYAS also means that the school day has been slightly extended and now ties in with the rest of the school, equating to just over an additional two hours of curriculum teaching time a week. Within that extra time, Early Years students receive one additional swimming lesson and one Physical Education (PE) lesson per week, taught by a specialist, as well as an additional ‘Yoga for Mindfulness’ lesson.
Early Years students also receive an introduction to French, a first for children within this age group at the school, maximising their ability to learn a new language at this age.
Furthermore, the school’s Early Years’ Co-curricular Activities (CCA) programme has been designed to complement the EYFS Curriculum, in order to provide further opportunities to develop students’ skills in physical development, communication and language, and personal, social and emotional development.
All three prime areas are incorporated into the curriculum, to ensure children of a young age are secure in such skills, and that they can communicate, converse, share, take turns, build relationships and develop their physical skills before starting more academic subjects such as Literacy and Maths.
NEW FOOD CLUB OPTION
With the introduction of free CCAs running from 3-4pm, parents are also offered the option to pay for external CCA activities from 4pm till 5pm.
The British International School’s CCAs celebrate their links with MIT and Juilliard, offering superb opportunities in STEAM club, music, ballet and dance. Also offered is Arabic, Swimming, Football, Craft Club and Cooking Club, which are available for Nursery to FS2. Importantly, CCA clubs are run by teachers who are familiar to the children.
The school has also cooked up an exceptional Food Club, which also forms part of EYAS, whereby parents can pay for pre ordered nutritious, healthy food for children to have at breaktimes and as a mid-morning snack, as well as ordering hot or cold lunches and snack packs for when a child participates in the CCA programme.
So far, both the EYAS and the CCA programmes have received positive feedback from parents. Moreover, for those parents with more than one child enrolled at the school, the extended school day means that all their children can be collected from school at the same time at the end of the day.
For more information, visit www.bisabudhabi.com
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