Welcome to Reception!

It is our intent to provide a happy, safe, stimulating and nurturing environment where children can become confident, independent and resilient learners. Children are encouraged to make choices and to develop confidence in themselves as creators, investigators and thinkers. Through planned experiences and high-quality interactions, it is our intent to promote the importance of celebrating the diversity of life and respect for all, within the local environment and wider world.

To encourage interest and challenge, we implement this through a carefully planned curriculum which reflects the interests of the children and ensures progression and continuity of skills in all seven areas of learning.

The Prime Areas

Communication and Language where children learn about listening, attention, understanding and speaking.

Physical Development where the focus is upon developing gross and fine motor skills.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development where children gain confidence and self-awareness, the ability to manage their feelings and behaviour and learn about building effective relationships with others.

The Specific Areas

Literacy where children will develop their comprehension, word reading and writing skills.

Mathematics where children will develop their understanding of number and numerical patterns.

Understanding the World within children will explore the past and present, people, culture and communities and the natural world.

Expressive arts and design where children will experiment with creating with materials and being imaginative and expressive.

Each child is unique, learns and experiences things in different ways. We value the diversity of each and every child in our care and celebrate their differences and individual characters. A child’s individual learning characteristic will determine the way they respond to both the teaching and learning taking place in the environment. During their time in our EYFS, we will be looking out for not just ‘what’ a child learns but ‘how’ they learn too. This is referred to as the ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning.’

Playing and exploring – where children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’.

Active learning – where children concentrate, keep on trying if they find things difficult and enjoy achievements.

Creating and thinking critically – where children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas and develop strategies for doing things.

We teach children individually, in small groups and as whole cohorts. Through a combination of adult led and continuous provision opportunities, activities are planned to encourage children to develop their learning independently through exploration and challenge. The characteristics of effective learning and the prime areas of learning contribute to the success of our children. They encourage the children to be independent, reflective and sociable. These areas also enable the children to apply their knowledge and skills into other areas of their learning and achieve the best that they can. The children are assessed through child-focused observations and verbal interactions. This information informs our planning for whole class and individual next steps in learning.

The impact of our curriculum is measured by outcomes year on year. We strive to ensure that our children’s attainment in the prime and specific areas of learning are at least in line with age-related expectations and that children make good progress from their unique starting points. We work to ensure our children develop into positive learners, who are excited by new challenges. We strive to ensure that our children leave our EYFS ready to move with confidence into KS1 and be academically, physically, socially and morally prepared for their future in education, Britain and the wider world.

Mrs Duxbury (Teacher and Early Years Leader) works full time in the EYFS unit and she is the key worker for all children in their Reception year at school. Mrs Harbert (teacher) is the key worker for all nursery age children. A key worker is your link person between home and school. Mrs Mitchell (Early years Practitioner) and Mrs Fowler (Teaching assistant) work full time with all EYFS, both Reception and Nursery, children. All our EYFS staff work together to help to ensure that every child's care is tailored to meet their individual needs so that they can make good progress and flourish.

Highlight of the week 11/11/24: Wow, Saplings had a super colourful ‘Odd Socks Day’! It was great to see so many of us wearing our odd socks to school and we loved listening to the story of ‘Simon Sock’ by Sue Hendra. This story helped us talk about how we are all different and unique. We used odd socks to create our own odd sock snake toy and designed our own odd socks. What a great day!

        

Highlight of the week 21/10/24: Super Saplings have been busy being marvellous mathematicians! In Maths, we have explored, copied and created simple repeating patterns. We have spotted and made colour, shape and action patterns and especially enjoyed making ones using items from the natural world. We used lots of mathematical vocabulary whilst talking about patterns and answering questions such as What pattern can you see? What pattern can you hear? What mistake can you see in my pattern? How could you fix the mistake in my pattern? Well done Saplings, your repeating patterns are fantastic!

        

Highlight of the week 07/10/24: Super Saplings have been busy being scientists! As part of our 'Our Body' unit of work in Science, we have been naming and investigating different parts of our body, including our arms, hands, feet, legs, eyes and nose. We have been talking about what we can and cannot do with these different body parts and used our PE and outdoor sessions to explore this in detail. We have created some amazing pieces of work and especially loved using the 'loose parts' to create different faces and people. Well done Saplings!

            

Highlight of the week 23/09/24: Wow! What a fantastic time Saplings had during their first forest school session. 
They loved searching for woodland animals, were excited to find different leaves and bugs using their magnifying glasses, used branches found on the forest floor to build dens, had a brilliant time exploring the mud kitchen and enjoyed relaxing in the hammocks! Well done Saplings, you were all amazing!

        

Highlight of the week 09/09/24: What a wonderful first week Saplings have had! All the children have been absolutely brilliant, making new friends and settling so well into their new learning environment. It has been a joy to watch them explore new activities and enjoy the beginning of their learning journey together in Reception. Well done Saplings, you are all superstars!