Early Years Curriculum

Overview

In our Early Years Class (Class 1) your child is part of the Early Years Foundation Stage. At Morland Area CE Primary School we personalise your child’s learning by observing their key interests and developing their skills through their passions.

Your child may come home every day and inform you that all they have done is ‘played’. This is planned play, specifically focused to ensure children are gaining the benefit of a relaxed learning environment. We aim to support and develop children’s learning through encouraging positive attitudes towards work.

We offer a happy, active, exciting, fun and secure Early Years’ experience for your child that supports their development, care and learning needs.

In our Early Years classrom, led by Mrs Williamson, our experienced practitioners implement the Early Years curriculum to support your child’s learning and development in seven areas, working towards the Early Learning Goals:

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development

• Communication and Language

• Physical Development

• Literacy Development

• Mathematical Development

• Understanding the World

• Expressive Arts and Design

Your child will enjoy a wide range of activities and experiences. All of these experiences are planned play and support your child’s next step in their learning.

Reading

We use a mixture of the Oxford reading Tree and Read Write Inc books as our reading scheme. The Oxford Reading Tree is regarded as the UK's number one reading programme which has taught millions of children to read... and to love to read. With systematic phonics at its heart, Oxford Reading Tree's well-loved characters, breadth and unrivalled support give you everything your children need to become confident and motivated readers. We blend this carefully together with the Read Write Inc books matching up carefully to the sounds we teach in our daily Phonics. 

The children start their reading experience at school with picture books. This allows the children to develop their story telling ability and use a wide range of vocabulary. We move children onto books with words when we feel that it is appropriate and the child is ready. 

Writing

Early writing is exciting and very special. Children love to make marks and may begin to assign meaning to what they have written. This is a very special and important stage in their writing development so please encourage your child to make marks at home.

Ideas could include:

• Writing/signing birthday cards

• Shopping lists before a visit to the supermarket

• Christmas lists

• Letters to family and friends

You can encourage your child to sound out the word (segment) for example cat=c-a-t and write the sounds they can hear.

Phonics

We follow a scheme called Read Write Inc. This phonics scheme depends upon children learning to read and write sounds effortlessly, so we make it simple and fun. The phonic knowledge is split into two parts.
First we teach them one way to read and write the 40+ sounds in English. We use pictures to help, for example we make ‘a’ into the shape of an apple, ‘f’ into the shape of a flower. These pictures help all children, especially those who find this tricky, to read the sounds easily.

Children learn to read words by sound-blending using a frog called Fred. Fred says the sounds and the children help him blend the sounds to read each word. Often children will count the sounds in words by using their ‘Fred Fingers’.

Then we teach children the different spellings of the same sounds, for example, they learn that the sound ‘ay’ is written ay, a-e and ai; the sound ‘ee’ is written ee, e and ea. We use phrases to help them remember each sound for example, ay, may I play, a-e – make a cake? We call these sounds with more than one letter 'special friends'. 

Maths

In Class 1 the Reception children get two sessions of Maths adult led input every day. They have a 20 minute Big Maths session which focusses on mental arithmetic and counting. The second session of the day focusses on the wider area of Maths including shape, space and measure.

Learning Journey

Your child has their own special online learning journal. This is where parents can log on to see what their child has been up to. Observations are a key aspect of the EYFS and we observe your child to find out their current interests and next steps in learning.

We would love you to be part of your child’s learning journey throughout Pre-School and Reception therefore you can add photographs and key comments onto your child’s online learning journal. If your child does something very special and you, as their parent/guardian, think ‘WOW’ please write it down either online as an observation or pass it on to Early Years staff. This will be added to your child’s learning journal.

Assessment of the Early Years

Assessment at the end of Reception plays an important part in helping parents, carers and practitioners to recognise children’s progress, understand their needs, and to plan activities and support. Ongoing assessment is an integral part of the learning and development process. It involves the Early Years staff observing children to understand their level of achievement, interests and learning styles, and reflecting upon these observations to inform future learning. 

Through these interactions, and the observations that parents and carers share, the EYFS staff constantly discuss the progress of the children through professional dialogue and recorded assessment. We make daily systematic observations and assessments of each child's achievements, interests and learning styles. We then use these observations and assessments to identify learning priorities and plan relevant and motivating learning experiences for each child.

Each child’s level of development is assessed against the early learning goals (above). The EYFS staff will indicate whether children are meeting expected levels of development:

               - Emerging - not yet reaching expected levels of development for age and working towards the expected level

               - Expected – children have met the national expected level of development