Welcome to the Early Years Foundation Stage at Osmotherley Primary School!
Intent
The EYFS at Osmotherley Primary School aims to inspire and engage pupils, providing the skills, knowledge and understanding they will need to succeed throughout their school career. Our pupils are unique and welcomed into our small school big family culture as soon as they enter the EYFS. We intend to support children to always feel confident to ask questions, self-reflect and adhere to the culture of mutual respect in our learning environment. We aim for all of our pupils to reach their full potential and become tolerant and respectful citizens of the future.
Implementation
Our children in the EYFS learn in a stimulating environment with high quality provision areas inside and outdoors. This includes our construction area, small world area, water area, mud kitchen, home corner, creative workshop and many more which are enhanced on a daily basis. We consider the individual needs and interests of each child and use this information to plan a challenging, progressive and highly motivating curriculum for each child.
Our pupils learn through a careful balance of child initiated and adult directed learning. Our small pupil numbers mean that we can often take the learning to the children as they are engaged in an activity of their choosing. Some learning such as phonics and reading practice sessions are delivered by an adult in a small group in a less distracting environment, so therefore not in provision. Due to our mixed class, children are able to be part of some group inputs for specific areas of learning ensuring secure foundations for learning in all curriculum areas and are then encouraged to develop their understanding through repeated practise of new vocabulary when in continuous provision. Please refer to the curriculum section of the website for our current EYFS progression document.
Daily Phonics
At Osmotherley, we have a rigorous approach to phonics teaching starting as soon as the children enter Reception. We use ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised’ to inform our planning. Each phonics directed teaching session comprises of four parts; revisit/review, teach, practise and apply. This ensures that children make rapid progress. Each child will take home a fully decodable book matched to the phonics sounds they have been taught, once they can blend sounds together in words. early reading skills. They will also take home a ‘real book’ from our library to help instill a love for reading.
Daily Repeated Reads
We love to read at school and choose carefully planned, high quality texts to read in a group every day. We act out the stories, learn new words to practise using in continuous provision and complete lots of fun activities linked to the story each day. We choose the stories carefully to challenge stereotypes, provide role models for all children and to give our children experiences of a range of cultures and religions in our country and world. These activities are recorded in our floorbook which we love to look back at.
Daily maths
Where possible we aim to take the learning to the children wherever they have chosen to play; inside or outside the classroom. We plan objective lead activities following the mastery approach supported with a wide range of practical resources. We use our school’s calculation policy and the White Rose Maths Scheme to plan for small steps of sequential learning to ensure children have a secure knowledge of number, shape, measure and pattern when they move into Year 1. This is supported by engaging enhancements throughout the provision.
If you would like to find out more about our EYFS, please contact the school office and come to have a look around!
