Early Years Foundation Stage

Children are introduced gently and sympathetically into a secure and nurturing learning environment. The curriculum provides indoor and outdoor learning opportunities to encourage the children’s creativity whilst offering a wide range of activities to enhance their personal, physical, social and emotional development through the seven areas of learning.

The curriculum is based on the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework. Emphasis is on ‘learning through play’ and the children are given opportunities to pursue their interests and develop their self confidence in social routines, structured play and the beginnings of the academic foundations.

The children at Nursery level are introduced to pre-reading and pre-number skills which prepares them for their transition to Reception where a more formal approach to literacy and numeracy is introduced. The children have an informal daily literacy session where they begin to discriminate sounds within both the environment and spoken word and learn how to form their letters. By the end of Reception the children use phonetic code to read and write simple stories and texts independently.

In our EYFS we teach the children using the ‘Read, Write Inc’ phonics scheme. This is continued into KS1 with an amalgamation with the ‘Jolly Phonics’ phonics scheme, which continues throughout the rest of the school. The children are given the opportunity to read ‘Home Readers’ from a range of different reading schemes. Some focus on phonics, using decodable words for the children to read. Others focus on ‘tricky’ words; words which are not decodable and have to be memorised.

We try to ensure that our mathematics lessons and activities are taught using ‘real life’, meaningful contexts. It is essential that they are purposeful and where possible link to the topic that the children are learning about. Our number or problem solving lessons and activities are often supported by the use of ‘Numicon’. Each EYFS classroom displays a Numicon number line and Numicon is available to the children on entry in our Nursery, within their independent play.

Children engage in role play, becoming characters from stories to retell them and participate in a wide range of activities which support communication and language development. Additionally, children in Early Years have lessons with specialised teachers in music, gym and French.

Each child’s progress is individually assessed and closely monitored as part of an ongoing process. Each child has an online profile to track their progress through Early Years. Parents have the opportunity to access their child’s profile to see progress made and can comment on their work.