EYFS

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Early Years

On this page you will find lots of information about our Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and what happens when your child starts at Redland School.

Our Reception year has two classes – Wrens and Owls. Each class has a full-time teacher and there are three teaching assistants that work across the setting.

The Early Years Foundation Stage is where the children start their learning journey. Children learn within a safe and secure environment. The children learn through a range of child and adult-led learning opportunities in both the classroom and outdoor area where they are immersed in a language rich environment. Learning is achieved through a range of fantastic hands-on activities and learning opportunities that are highly engaging and enjoyable.

We aim to provide exciting learning opportunities that are based around the 7 Prime and Specific areas set out in the Early Years framework. These areas are developed alongside the 3 learning characteristics as set out below.

Prime areas of learning:

Communication and language

Physical Development

Personal, Social and Emotional Development.

Specific areas of learning:

Literacy

Mathematics

Understanding the World

Expressive Arts and Design

The Characteristics of Effective Learning

Through playing and exploring your child will:

Find out and explore the world around them

Use what they know in their play

Be willing to have a go

Through active learning your child will:

Concentrate and get involved

Persevere and keep trying

Enjoy creating and achieving what they set out to do.

Through creating and thinking critically your child will:

Think of their own ideas

Use their knowledge to learn new things

Investigate and choose their own ways to do things and find new ways.

Phonics and Reading

Each child’s reading journey begins before they start school. In EYFS and Key Stage 1, phonics is a key focus of our teaching and children are introduced to this using our phonics scheme Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a systematic synthetic phonics programme developed for schools. It provides a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum and prepares the children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check, taken in Year 1. Children are given regular opportunities to apply the phonics they have learned in whole class sessions to read fully decodable books in small reading groups. The phonic progression in these books match the progression of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
• decoding
• prosody – reading with meaning, stress and intonation
• comprehension – understanding the text.

There is an excellent parent information section on the Little Wandle website which will help support children with saying sounds and writing letters at home. There are also some useful videos so parents can see how the children are taught at school and give confidence when supporting with reading at home. Find the full Reception and Year 1 teaching programme overview at https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/ to see what the children will learn and when.