FOUNDATION STAGE CURRICULUM EVENING Welcome

What is the Early Years Foundation Stage? The Early Years Foundation Stage (E.Y.F.S.) is the stage of education for children from birth to the end of the Reception year. It is based on the recognition that children learn best through play and active learning. This is a very important stage as it helps your child get ready for school as well as preparing them for their future learning and successes. Their early years experience should be happy, active, exciting, fun and secure; and support their development, care and learning needs.

Children should mostly develop the 3 prime areas first. These are: 1. Personal, social and emotional development 2. Physical development 3. Communication and language. Your child will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge and demonstrating their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in 4 specific areas. These are: 1. Literacy; 2. Mathematics; 3. Understanding the world; and 4. Expressive arts and design.

THE PRIME AREAS These are essential to children‘s development and feed into all other aspects of the EYFS curriculum. They are…

PERSONAL, SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT become self-confident; have awareness of their own feelings and the feelings of others; take an interest in things; become independent; tell the difference between right and wrong. The children will be learning to:

COMMUNICATION AND LANGUAGE talk confidently and clearly; show awareness of listener enjoy listening to stories, songs and poems, showing good attention; follow instructions; answer questions about stories The children will be learning to:

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT move confidently; control their body; handle equipment (including scissors, pencils, balls, trikes etc) manage their own basic hygiene and personal needs including dressing and undressing independently The children will be learning to:

LITERACY hear and say sounds, and link them to the alphabet; read and write familiar words and sentences; learn to use a pencil effectively. The children will be learning to:

MATHEMATICS The children will be learning to:  develop an understanding of Maths through stories, songs, games and imaginative play;  become comfortable with numbers and with ideas such as 'heavier than' or 'bigger’;  be aware of shapes, space and measures

UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD The children will: explore and find out about the world around them, asking questions about it; build with different materials, explore everyday technology and learn what it is used for; find out about past events in their lives and their families' lives; find out about different cultures and beliefs.

EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND DESIGN The children will explore: colours and shapes; making things; role play; making music and singing songs

READING IN RECEPTION A large emphasis will be placed on developing a love of books and working hard to get your child to read by the end of the year. The expectation is for the majority of children to leave Reception reading yellow banded books (children start on a pink book, move onto red then yellow) Reading will be taught through a multi-layered approach: -Letters and Sounds- taught daily in 20 minute sessions. -Individual reading with the class teacher and again in a Guided Reading session. -Regular ‘modelled reading’ by the class teacher with Fred the Frog using ‘big books’ -Regular storytime sessions

LETTERS AND SOUNDS High quality phonics teaching is an essential component in teaching children to read. Lessons taught daily for 20 minutes in a strict review, teach, practise, apply format Children are taught the sound that letters make in order use these to ‘blend’ together to say a word e.g. s-a-t makes sat Later examples include ‘ch-ea-p’ Sounds are taught in a ‘pure’ form without any other distortion

HOW DO WE MONITOR CHILDREN’S PROGRESS ? HOW DO WE KNOW WHEN YOUR CHILD IS READY FOR A READING BOOK? All children develop at different rates… In order to effectively access a pink book children need to be able to recognise most letter sounds as well as blend these together to say the word e.g. p-i-n says pin. This is a harder skill than you might imagine! We are teaching these skills daily and monitor them weekly to ensure that as soon as these foundations are in place we can send a book home to reinforce our reading skills. We are also practising the required skills through individual keyrings. Please do not worry if your child is not yet accessing a school reading book. We all learn at different rates. It is very demoralising to be a given a book that you cannot access or to remain on the same level for weeks. Benchmarking. This is used to assess if children are ready for the next book level. It is based on the ability to segment and blend as above, the recognition of high frequency words and, very importantly, a child’s comprehension of a book.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP. The role of parents/ carers is vital in supporting your child to read. Listen to your child, or read to them daily if possible. Reading a story to your child is just as valuable as them reading it themselves if they are tired or not yet ready for a book. Get children to have a good look at the pictures first, always talk about what they can see in the pictures, what they think the story may be about before attempting the text. Practise you child’s keyring; both recognition of the sounds as well as how these fit together to make a word. Alternatively you may have high frequency, tricky words to learn to recognise ‘on sight’ Read to your child, in particular dads to sons! A good reading role model is vital to children!

WRITING Writing is modelled regularly in Reception e.g. Letters and Sounds lessons, modelled writing sessions following a story Children learn to write single cvc (consonant-vowel-consonant) words first using the sounds that they have learned or already know, for example we recently read ‘The 3 Little Pigs’ so worked with the teacher to construct a pig picture using maths shapes. Underneath the picture we wrote ‘a pig’ by saying the words over and over again, stretching them to hear the p-i-g sounds contained within Once children can write simple words they then move on to writing short sentences using the ‘Think it, Say it, Write it’ method to orally rehearse and practise what they want to say. Writing is very interlinked with many areas of the EYFS curriculum and involves a lot of skills for example, the ability to hear and identify the sounds in words, remember or find out what the letter sounds look like, using an efficient tripod grip to form the letters correctly with the muscles of the hand. All of that before even considering tricky word spellings, finger spaces, capital letters and full stops!

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP If your child wants to write, try to help them to hear as many sounds as possible in the words that they want to write and model how to form these letters correctly. Let them see you write (dads in particular)!

MATHEMATICS IN RECEPTION Children will cover counting up to 20 Counting in 2s and 10s Knowing doubles of numbers to 10 and begin to make the link with halving Understand terms more, less, equal to Be able to give 1 more/less of given numbers Lots of maths in Reception will be practical to enhance understanding

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP  Play maths games in the car  Play cards and games using dice which involve quick adding calculations

OUTDOOR LEARNING Children will be encouraged to learn through investigation and exploration activities set up outside daily. The outdoor environment will be used in all weathers (apart from hurricanes!) Forest School Learning on a Friday morning.

PE IN RECEPTION Please ensure your child has a PE kit in school at all times. Please encourage your child to dress independently at home. Please label ALL PE kit including pumps. Please ensure that on PE days your child wears no jewellery.

FINALLY……….. We have an open door policy – if you have any concerns please do not hesitate to come and talk to us. Thank you