High quality interactions - At Thornhill we provide high-quality interactions between adults and children. We ensure there are a balance of child-initiated and adult-initiated activities, providing the most appropriate levels of challenge for children. This challenge emerges through sustained shared thinking. Practices such as modelling behaviour or skills and asking open-ended questions are associated with successful sustained shared thinking. High-quality interactions are generally 1-2-1 or small-group interactions. All adults in the setting have good knowledge of the curriculum and how children learn.

Guided play - At Thornhill we emphasise on guided free play as it contributes enormously to children's development. Guided free play is supported by adults, and involves adults helping children to reflect and question in order to understand what they have learnt.

Assessment - At Thornhill, each topic begins with a preliminary assessment through a discussion and a collection of initial ideas and prior knowledge. Using formative and summative assessment approaches of assessment, the content is then differentiated, taught and assessed both at the end of a lesson and entire topic through self-assessment and teacher observations. Formative assessment is used greatly in the early years at Thornhill to inform curriculum differentiation in order to support the needs of individual pupils and thus we believe it can result in pupils making increased progress. This is especially true when feedback is provided to pupils during activities.