What is the foundation stage and how will reception children be taught at Firle?

Reception is the final year of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). It is recognised that a child’s experience in the early years has a major impact on their future life chances. The EYFS is a framework that provides an assurance that children have a right to a secure, safe and happy childhood. The overarching aim of the EYFS is to help children achieve the five Every Child Matters outcomes of staying safe, being healthy, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic well-being.

There are 4 principles –

• A unique child – this recognises that each child is a competent learner from birth who can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured. Here we are looking at development, inclusion, safety, health and general well-being.

Here we work with you to help your child make the move to school happily. We work in partnership with the school nurse who screens the children for a basic health check in the term they are 5. We help to identify speech, vision and hearing problems and ask you to see your GP sometimes for check ups and tests. We are aiming to help the children become independent; able to separate from their parents; able to manage their own belongings and clothes; able to use the loo and use cutlery to feed themselves independently. We ask you to make sure they get enough sleep and that they come to school on time, calm and ready to learn and participate.

• Positive relationships – how children learn to be strong and independent from a base of loving and secure relationships with parents and, as they join school, with their teachers.  Areas this covers are respect; partnership with parents; supporting learning; and the role of the teacher as a key person in the child’s life.

As a small school and in a small class, we are privileged to be able to get to know your children really well. To do this we need to work in partnership with you. I have already started to gather information about your child from their pre-school setting, from talking to you, from meeting your child and this will be an on-going process. I will ask you to work with me by telling me about your child’s achievements and each child has a folder called their Learning Journal, which you can add to as well as us, to note and stick in examples of developments and learning. I will stick in the early learning goals so that you can become familiar with what we are looking out for when we are observing the children and will show you how we assess them, and what your child’s next steps are. You can add to it before or after school. It’s quite important to encourage your child to socialise with play-dates. I normally ask if agree if I make a list to circulate of your names, telephone numbers and email addresses to parents in the class.

• Enabling environments – how the environment plays a key role in supporting and extending children’s development and learning. This involves the use of observation, assessment and planning, support for every child – personalised learning, the learning environment – indoors and outdoors, also transitions, continuity and multi-agency working.

At Firle we have been working towards personalised learning and this forms the basis of teaching in the foundation stage. Children are able to access most resources independently and have quite a lot of choice about how to use them to support their play and learning. On a typical day there is always access to water, sand, mark making, computers, construction toys, small world toys, books, balance equipment, science equipment, role play and dressing up, puppets, musical instruments. On a regular basis there is access to – playdough and other malleables, junk modelling, painting, pastels, clay, other electronic and programmable toys, special toys like Playmobil and Lego.

We try to use the outside areas daily, depending on weather, number of adults and appropriate clothing. All children need to have a pair of wellies that are named and can live in school on our boot rack. In September and the summer months children must be protected with sun-cream and provided with a sunhat that can stay in school. Children also need to be sent with a coat with a hood that will keep them dry on our many treks across the playground to get to the other building. Please choose a coat that your child can fasten and unfasten independently.

If your child has been seen by the Early Years learning support team, they will still remain under their care until Christmas, when the support comes under the usual services accessed by the school. There will be a transition meeting to ensure information is shared and that your child can be helped to make a smooth transition to a school setting.

• Learning and development – this recognises that children learn and develop in different ways and at different rates, and that all areas of learning are equally important and inter-connected.

There are 6 areas of the Foundation Stage curriculum and these are of equal importance. They are Personal, Social and Emotional Development; Language, Literacy and Communication; Problem solving, Reasoning and Numeracy (used to be Mathematical Development); Knowledge and Understanding of the World; Physical Development and Creative Development. In each of these 6 areas there are stepping stones leading to Early Learning Goals.

All six areas are delivered through planned, purposeful play, with a balance of adult-led and child-initiated activities. Planning is taken from termly overviews, where I have thought of likely topics that I would like to cover. There is plenty of flexibility to also plan from the children’s interests. For example, one of the children recently brought in a snail, so I found out from the children what they already knew about snails and what they would like to find out. We then did some research together and some art and science activities based on snails.

The children need a chance to engage in extended, meaningful play. As their teacher, my role is to facilitate that and to extend and enhance it by supplying resources, encouraging language skills and modelling sharing, good communication, etc. Depending on how the play and activities are progressing, we decide on a daily basis whether to go to whole school worship or not. However, we always take part in Friday’s sharing assembly. We do have a formal snack time and join the rest of the school for a fixed morning play at break time.

There is a formal assessment of all children at the end of their reception year. This is called the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile. These results get sent off to County and are used for data analysis. I receive records from pre-schools that tell me how the children are developing against the targets for the first year of the foundation stage. I then assess the children during the first half term – this is all part of their play/learning experience and they will not be aware of it. I also ask you, as parents, to participate in this process though discussions and a questionnaire. A summary of my assessments will be reported to you at a parents’ consultation in October/November. Subsequent assessments are part of my on-going practice but are reviewed again officially in the spring and summer terms, when progress is reported to parents in an end of year report.

How can you help?

Literacy is an area where we need your support.

• We teach letter sounds using a scheme called Jolly Phonics. This is a commercial, multi-sensory approach where the child learns to recognise the letter alongside a picture, to make an action and say the letter sound. As the sounds are learnt, I will be sending home a sheet to let you know which sounds have been covered, so that you can support the learning at home. I am going to continue using the purple phonics books, as I have done in previous years and these are a shared resource between home and school. They need to stay in book bags please so that we can access them when we need to. Alongside learning letter sounds, we also teach how to segment and blend words. Lists of words will come home for your child to practise and I will keep a copy in their purple books as a record of progress.
• We teach lower case letters – only using capitals in the appropriate places. We mainly focus on letter sounds, but the children eventually need to know the letter names as well.

Your child will be started on graded reading scheme books (sticker books), once they know the letter sounds, show an awareness of pointing to individual words and can use their phonic skills to segment and blend words. Children will progress at their own rate, without any undue pressure, but we expect most average children to have started to read by the end of their reception year. Home learning for Reception children is daily reading with an adult. This is crucial to your child becoming a reader. Every morning I will check the reading diary and children will be rewarded with a sticker for reading at home. They may change their book every day. The reading diary is also a way that we can communicate with each other. Please check book bags daily for newsletters, bumped head letters, etc.