Every child deserves the best possible start in life and the support that enables them to fulfil their potential. Children develop quickly in the early years and a child’s experiences between birth and age five have a major impact on their future life chances. A secure, safe and happy childhood is important in its own right. Good parenting and high quality early learning together provide the foundation children need to make the most of their abilities and talents as they grow up.

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) sets the standards that all early years providers must meet to ensure that children learn and develop well and are kept healthy and safe. It promotes teaching and learning to ensure children’s ‘school readiness’ and gives children the broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good future progress through school and life.

EYFS follow the same scheme as the rest of the school: ‘ The Way, the truth, the life’. The RE curriculum purposely builds upon prior knowledge of religious concepts, key figures and vocabulary. As a Catholic School the children learn about the Catholic Faith based around Jesus, his life and his teachings. Our EYFS children are encouraged to live out our mission statement ‘ We Grow together in God’s love’ and are encouraged to live their lives as Jesus lived his e.g. being kind, caring and sharing with each other. All children learn that they are talented and unique individuals who have a great contribution to make to the world in their own right.

Children say prayers daily in class and participate in prayer and liturgy choosing artefacts for their altar and engaging with scripture on a level that they understand. They are part of our whole school collective worship and write bidding prayers for our school newsletter.

Our EYFS curriculum outlines ‘the what’ – the knowledge and skills we want our children to learn in nursery and reception. It then outlines ‘the how’ - this is how we teach the intended knowledge and skills.

Each half term, nursery and reception follow a theme. The themes are linked to what is happening in the children’s lives or what is happening around them. We value the importance of children being able to follow their own interests - therefore this curriculum remains flexible but intentional.

Our curriculum is ambitious, we have some ambitious curricular goals for our children that we want every child to access and make progress towards. We know that all children are not going to make the same progress towards the goal but all children are involved in the curriculum to make the best individual progress they can.

What do we want for our children?

We want our children to:

1. Grow Together in God’s Love:
2. be great communicators: through talking, writing and reading. We have created a language rich environment by reading a lot and talking a lot.
3. be healthy - emotionally and physically:

 

1.  We want our children to: Grow Together in God’s Love:

Here at St Anne’s our core values of love, responsibility and respect ensure all members of our community can live out our mission statement: ‘We Grow Together in God’s Love.’ Our high expectations and our clear behaviour policy ensures that all children are given the opportunity to achieve their full potential. Our highly motivated and dedicated staff ensure that all children feel part of God’s family and that they are encouraged to try their best in all that they do. 

We pride ourselves on creating a broad and balanced curriculum in which all children can develop their God given talents and ‘live life to the full’ (John 10:10). Our aim is to provide a rich, fun-filled curriculum which develops the whole child through high quality teaching, learning and first hand experiences. Our children are at the heart of everything we do at St Anne’s and their emotional health and well-being is equally as important as their academic achievements.

 

2.  We want our children to: Be great communicators: through talking, writing and reading. We have created a language rich environment by reading a lot and talking a lot.

Research shows that language is the foundation of learning, of thinking and underpins the development of later literacy skills. Improving children’s vocabulary is a high priority; a child’s vocabulary at 5 predicts how well they will learn to read and how well they will do in the school system. As children learn to read, those children with a good vocabulary inevitably understand the words they are reading. The understand the books and stories being read to them. This helps to facilitate an early love of reading, books and learning. At St Anne’s we read to the children and talk about what we have read. Those children who quickly learn to decode and read fluently want to read more and learn more. Shared reading, story-telling and explicitly extending children’s vocabulary are embedded and weaved throughout our curriculum. It is important to not leave learning to ‘chance’; it is important to plan specifically and systematically – step by step – to develop children’s vocabulary.

We take a two-step approach to creating our language rich environment:

• We read a lot - Children are read to everyday at least twice a day.

• We talk a lot - We follow the ‘Shrec’ model for ensuring high quality adult – child interactions.

We read a lot - Guaranteed Reading Spine:

These lists outline the collection of books we want all our Early Years children to hear, experience and enjoy.

• Favourite Five Booklist
• The Drawing Club Booklist (reception only)
• The Think Equal Booklist
• The Talk Through Stories Booklist

Favourite Five Booklist. Each half term nursery and reception have 5 different books which we repeatedly read. We believe these books are worth reading over and over and over again. They bring joy. The adults love reading them. The children love hearing them and joining in! If a child has attended both our nursery and reception, by the time the child leaves reception they will have heard 60 of these books over and over again.

The Drawing Club Booklist. (Reception only) The Drawing Club books are used as a stimulus for Reception’s communication, language and literacy sessions. We have mapped out stories, tales and animations which we know will delight our children. We have mapped out the vocabulary we ‘sprinkle’ on the children during these sessions. This vocabulary is not always in the book but vocabulary which relates to the book in some way. For example, the word ‘Gobble’ is not in the book ‘Not Now Bernard’ but it is a word we talk to the children about when we read this book. A word children enjoy saying. A word children can use during their own day in their own play. Children immediately start ‘gobbling’ their fruit at the snack table. This word is repeated again and again throughout the day and year in various contexts, until it makes its way into the children’s long term memory. When the children have the skills to read the word ‘gobble’ they have a deep understanding of what it means.

The Talk Through Stories Booklist: Talk through Stories sessions form the nursery’s communication, language and literacy sessions. For Reception, these sessions are for a planned, timetabled story time. The books are read and activities are completed in one session. There is then a separate vocabulary session at another time. There is a word of the day in both nursery and reception and these are tier 2 words taken from the book of the week. We explicitly teach these tier 2 words in a planned, timetabled session using various games – that the children love! These words are then practised throughout the day repeatedly. We have chosen words which we know children are going to be able to find examples of in our setting – therefore using the words in context of their own lives. For example, the word ‘hunted’ - our outside provision provides endless opportunities to hunt for worms, woodlice and so on.

The Think Equal Booklist: (Further information below)

We talk a lot: We use the ‘ShREC’ approach to ensure high quality interactions in EYFS. The aim of the ShREC approach is to provide our staff with a simple, memorable set of specific evidence informed strategies that are embedded into everyday practice. Adults are available to the children to have high quality adult child interactions; to have back and forth conversations; to model effective language; to model sentence structures and to extend children’s vocabulary.

• Share attention: be at the child’s level. Pay attention to what they are focused on
• Respond: Follow the child’s lead. Respond to their non – verbal and verbal communications. Maybe, make a brief comment on what they can see, hear, feel.
• Expand: Repeat what the child says and build on it by adding more words to turn it into a sentence.
• Conversation: Have extended back and forth interactions. Give children time to listen, process and reply.

Nursery rhymes, songs and poems:

Each half term nursery and reception have 5 different nursery rhymes or songs which we repeatedly sing with the children. These change each half term. In EYFS we have a daily nursery rhyme and song session. We also teach a new poem each half term. Singing nursery rhymes, songs and learning poems are likely to help children develop phonological awareness, as this develops we see children able to manipulate smaller units of sounds – phonemic awareness. Children develop the ability to manipulate the smallest unit of sound as well as tune in to rhyme, hear and understand intonation, sequence (nursery rhymes have a beginning, middle and end), learn new vocabulary, help with speech-sound development, develop mouth and tongue muscles and develop early mathematic skills.

Writing:

Transcription: Spelling

Children are taught to segment and blend sounds. When children can write they use ‘fred fingers’ to ‘pinch sounds’ to write words.

Transcription: Handwriting

Extensive practice is needed to develop effective handwriting (EEF). Through continuous provision children are given unstructured as well as structured opportunities to practice their mark making, writing and handwriting. We provide an array of attractive writing tools to capture attention and help motivate children to write some examples: gel pens, ‘teacher pens’, chalk, paint as well as pencils and whiteboard pens. We provide an array of media for children to write on: Some examples: note books, post it notes, a roll of paper on the floor for children to draw and colour whilst lying on their tummies. Accurate letter formation is an essential early skill that forms the basis of a fluent handwriting style. In turn, this supports writing composition. When children are introduced to a new sound in Read Write inc there is great emphasis on modelling to the children the correct letter formation.

Children are supported daily to develop their physical skills in order to hold a writing tool comfortably enough to mark make and later to write. Fine motor challenges permeate the classroom through continuous provision planning. Each morning, all children in EYFS complete their ‘morning jobs’ which is a weekly carousel of fine motor activities. In the afternoon, children in nursery will practice their name writing whilst reception children focus on letter formation. Children are introduced to handwriting guidelines in reception. Reception children learn to form their letters correctly using the Read, Write inc letter formation phrases coupled with phrases used during hand writing lessons. This allows children to find their own individual remembered phrase to help them to form letters correctly.

Composition (articulating ideas in speech before writing them down):

Oral and Writing composition:

Effective writing is underpinned by children’s expressive language capabilities. It is important, therefore, to develop and monitor children’s capability to formulate and articulate increasingly sophisticated sentences and later express them in writing. Literacy lessons and story sessions enable children to have access to a broad range of opportunities to develop their expressive language. Activities might include storytelling, group reading, or role play. Children orally rehearse words, captions, and later sentences with their talk partners with support from adults. Children use ‘sound buttons’ to record their own voices before writing down what they have rehearsed.

Children are taught that marks and symbols carry meaning. Children in EYFS are given lots of opportunities to orally rehearse their sentences before they draw, mark make, write singles letters, words, phrases and later write sentences. We enhance motivation for writing by modelling to and encouraging children to write for a range of purposes and audiences.  Each half term there is a continuous provision writing focus across EYFS. These are meaningful opportunities for children to learn about the written word and supports children understand that symbols carry meaning. These opportunities are linked to the children’s own lives or a seasonal topic or festival and there are planned opportunities for children to share their writing with their intended audience.

 

3.  We want our children to be healthy - emotionally and physically:

We use the ‘Think Equal’ programme to educate our children about emotional health. The programme uses a story as a starting point for each objective. These books are used as a stimulus for our Personal, social and emotional development sessions. Think Equal is a holistic Early Years Programme based on a commitment to social equality, gender, racial and religious equality, social and emotional health and well being and global citizenship, based in social-emotional learning. The programme views children as individual parts of a collective, global fabric and aims to support them as they begin a lifelong learning journey unburdened by the restraints of discriminatory mind-sets. It endows them with knowledge and experiential understanding of values and life skills or competencies such as empathy, inclusion, self-confidence, emotional literacy, self-regulation, peaceful conflict resolution, and so forth. It encourages and empowers them in assuming responsibilities as global citizens, and becoming ‘up standers’ and transformers of society through the use of critical, inclusive and creative thinking.

We have a great emphasis on outside play to enable our children to physically develop.