Children eagerly grasp any opportunity to discover more about their world. At Double Decker, we offer an integrated curriculum and an environment where your child can actively pursue their own learning and development. Our bilingual early-years curriculum is carefully planned and structured to ensure that:

• Provision is made for the different starting points from which your child develops their learning, building upon what they can already do using a scaffolding approach.
• Relevant and stimulating learning experiences match the different levels of your child’s needs.
• Planned and purposeful, fun activities provide opportunities for teaching and learning, both indoors and outdoors.

Our curriculum covers six broad areas of learning and development:

Personal, Social and Emotional

We encourage independence and self-discipline, so that we can approach life with confidence, enthusiasm and an awareness of self and others. We emphasise play as a way of creatively exploring relationships and our social environment.

Communication, Language and Literacy
We learn to talk confidently and clearly, enjoying stories, songs and poems in both English and German with mother-tongue staff members. We encourage seeing the purpose of written language and to experiment with it.

Mathematics
We develop an understanding of maths through stories, songs, games, imaginative play and manipulative materials, and become comfortable with numbers and with mathematical ideas, such as ‘bigger’ or ‘less than’, and discover shape, space and pattern.

Knowledge and Understanding of Our World
We explore the world around us, both on a local and global scale. Emphasis is placed on science, with many opportunities to conduct our own experiments.

Physical Development
We learn to move with confidence, controlling our bodies and handling equipment that improves small and large motor skills. We have frequent outdoor activities during the week, whether it be in the park, on an excursion or exploring the local forests.

Creativity / Expressive Arts
We explore colour, form, texture, art techniques, movement, expression, drama and music. In the bilingual environment music is of particular importance. Making music brings us together and means that we assimilate a new language much more easily through singing, dancing and playing instruments. Fostering a musical ear also assists in improving language, literacy and math skills, and is a great tool for self-expression, helping to build confidence.

Whilst topical learning provides one opportunity to meet our curriculum objectives, we always have opportunities for your child to participate in planning their own activities and, with the support of our teachers, to discuss what they hope to achieve and how they hope to do so.
Our teachers also set specific tasks with learning objectives in mind. Our focus on your child’s stage of development allows our teachers to design suitable activities that incorporate appropriate support. This tailored, scaffolding approach is a fundamental tool in our support of each individual child’s learning and development.

At Double Decker we firmly believe that a nurturing environment creates the context for positive learning and development of the whole child. In doing so we help strengthen self-confidence, encourage personalities to flourish, and enable positive bilingual language development.
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Our success as a bilingual school stems from the investment we make in your child’s personal development, as well as our emphasis on staff and parent involvement and relationships.

Bilingual learning
The early years are crucial in easily achieving bilingualism; we know that children are particularly able to assimilate different languages before the age of seven. Research has further suggested that children who are already bilingual find successive languages even easier to learn, and that learning multiple languages stimulates parts of the brain responsible for mathematic and musical abilities.

We support this window of opportunity by providing an immersive and balanced English-German curriculum within the multilingual school community. Children experience both of the school languages through play, and in group and individual learning sessions. We regularly sing songs, and associate each of the two languages with specific teachers who communicate in their mother tongues, either English or German.

Personal Development
Alongside developing language skills, we place a strong emphasis on encouraging and promoting social interaction, creativity and respect for others. We encourage tolerance, curiosity and empathy for other languages and cultures, as well as a positive disposition for learning. This is done in a supportive and safe environment, allowing your child to blossom.
We understand that children develop rapidly during the early years – physically, intellectually, emotionally and socially. We implement effective teamwork and observations to ensure that our teaching supports and extends knowledge, skills, understanding and confidence. Learning includes skills for life such as independence, and care for one another and the environment.
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Our Staff
Our dynamic team is central to delivering Double Decker’s vision. We have a policy of employing only native English or German speakers, who are independent thinkers and keen to make a difference. We support our staff in their own professional development, encouraging them to express and develop their own individual skills.

Our Parents
At Double Decker we work hard to build strong relationships with you, our parents, without whom we couldn’t support any child fully. To that end, we maintain open and positive communication between the school and our parents, so that we can work effectively together.

We also have an active Parents’ Association that is central to our school spirit, alongside opportunities for you to get involved in the school day, such as through story telling. In the process, a strong and supportive parent network is formed.