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 as our reading scheme. This is 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.

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.

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 Santa

If your child is beginning to use letter shapes and letters in their writing, for example writing their name, please can you support us by using our school letter format. You can also encourage our 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 slower-starters, to read the sounds easily.

Children learn to read words by sound-blending using a frog called Fred. Fred says the sounds and 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?

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 focuses on mental arithmetic and counting. The second session of the day focuses 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 every day. 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.