EYFS
Early Years Foundation Stage
This stage covers 'Little Whittle', our Pre-school and our Reception Classes. The curriculum at our school is planned from Pre-school to Year 6. For more information about our Pre-school click the button
Our Primary School like all other Early Years providers, delivers the Revised Early Years Foundation Stage, (EYFS).
Reception Class
The education our children receive in the Early Years is of vital importance. As such, the Flourish Curriculum throughout the Early Years is carefully designed to ensure that progress is secured in all areas of learning, with a strong focus on the prime areas especially communication and language. The curriculum is ambitious and is structured strategically so that children can develop, consolidate, and deepen their knowledge, understanding and skills ready for Year 1.
Encouraging children to love reading in central to what we do. We teach children to read in Reception using Bug Club Phonics which is an accredited systematic, synthetic programme. This is used alongside Bug Club 100% decodable reading books and access to Bug Club online. We promote a love of reading through reading aloud and sharing a diverse range of stories and rhymes. We have a reading reward scheme in class which encourages reading at home and values everyone’s achievement.
To ensure learning is effective in Reception, our curriculum combines:
– play
– exploration
– active learning
– creative thinking
– critical thinking
We aim to ensure your child has the most special start to their education whilst ensuring we develop their cultural capital. In Reception, a special community link with Highcliffe residential care home has been established in which the children visit once or twice a term to share songs, crafts and develop relationships with the residents.
We enrich our curriculum with visits and visitors. During the spring term, to celebrate and learn about our local heroes in our community, we invite police officers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, vets, and a farmer (with his tractor!) into school to visit the children. We visit the Gujarat Hindu Temple in Preston during summer term to enhance our learning of ‘Special Places’ in RE and to deepen our understanding of different faiths and cultures.
Your child will be given the opportunity to care for a living animal during our chick hatching experience in class, developing their independence skills, sense of responsibility, and understanding of the natural world. To encourage independence, the children get fully changed for PE at school. We have a rolling snack table in class where children ‘pay’ for their snack using Numicon and attempt to open their own snacks then clean up after themselves. When learning about money during maths in summer term, we walk to our local Co-op in Whittle to use money independently. Commando Joe’s is incorporated into our PSHE learning to develop our Personal, Social and Emotional development. We love to use our outdoor area and love to learn outside whatever the season or weather.
We believe a strong parent partnership is incredibly important. Therefore we have a wonderful transition programme when we invite our new families for stay and play sessions and a teddy bear’s picnic to welcome you to our school community. During your child’s first term at school, we will invite you into school for our early maths, reading and writing workshops. We send out a weekly newsletter detailing our learning for the week and our vocabulary focus. In this newsletter, we give opportunities to develop knowledge and understanding of concepts taught through home learning. We ask for ‘Wow’ moments from home to be shared via Dojo to help inform us of your child’s next steps and for you to be an active part in their learning journey. You will be invited into school termly for our stay and play sessions to play with your child. During spring term, we run our special ‘Stay and play with our chicks and family Easter egg scavenger hunt’, which is always very popular!
We have a class Learning Journey Journal for both Little Whittle Pre-school and Reception. If you would like to look at these during pick up time, you are more than welcome. The children love to look through these as an aid to remembering what they have learnt. We often spend time looking at these together as a class.
To see more of our learning, please follow the link below to our EYFS Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/wlweyfs
Please see below for our EYFS curriculum map. The whole school Flourish Curriculum is on this website to help parents and carers understand how each subject is discretely taught. Teaching is fluid and flexible; we incorporate children’s interests and topical issues alongside set plans particularly in EYFS.
Find out what we are learning in Pre-school and Reception here:
EYFS Curriculum Overview and Map
