Learning in the Early Years: .

What is the Early Years Foundation Stage (E.Ys)? The E.Y.F.S/EYs 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. We teach through active learning and planned play opportunities. We put a context behind our learning so children understand why and how they would use skills in real-life situations. We teach, and then provide an environment allowing children to consolidate these skills in different situations.

A Creative Curriculum. We teach through half-termly topics. We teach an active curriculum and life-skills. We explore the how and the why.

Our core values……

-We listen to children and respect them as individuals.

-Parents are partners in their child’s learning and play a key role in their child’s progress.

-Children are competent, capable, powerful learners who have lots of potential.

-Experiencing the outdoors is crucial.

-The learning environment has a significant impact on children’s learning.

-Working collaboratively, co-operatively and part of a team is valued.

-Secure relationships between children and adults is vital.

-Links with the community is very important.

-The possibilities of learning are limitless.

Busy Fingers Children need support to develop the muscles needed for fine motor control. We rely upon these muscles to complete daily tasks, for example; Doing up buttons Cutting Opening packages Threading Writing As adults we sometimes assume that children are already competent in these skills, however, these skills must be taught.

Writing Children do not usually come into school with early writing skills. But it is important that they see themselves as a writer right from the onset. Scribing is VERY important in Reception because: It models writing to the children. It shows a child’s knowledge and understanding. We also begin teaching early writing patterns. This could be with paint, in corn flour gloop, shaving foam etc and is to develop the control needed to write letters. TASK: Can you copy these writing patterns with your non-dominant hand?

Reading and Writing We quickly cover phase 2 and 3 phonemes and spend lots of time on blending and segmenting for reading and writing. During guided reading and writing we focus on sentence structure; capital letters/finger spaces/ full-stops etc. We construct human sentences, look for mistakes and check with our ‘silent signals’. By the end of reception the expectation is that a child can write 2 phonetically plausible sentences unaided.

Mathematical Development Number Shape and space. We teach children through practical, purposeful lessons and real-life situations.

Maths We aim for our children to learn concepts through kinaesthetic experiences. Example: when learning pairs to ten, we might explore how many ways we can pay for an object costing 10p. Adding Machine-visual and kinaesthetic way of learning how to add two numbers. Shape- It is no good children rote learning the names of plastic shapes, we would encourage learning shapes in the environment, for example, shape hunts, junk modelling etc. By the end of reception the expectation are that a child would be able to add and subtract small numbers, double and halve numbers, recognise 2d and 3d shapes, patterns. Count reliably 1-20 and back, say one more and one less than a given number. Use everyday language to talk about size, weight and capacity.