Early Years
Early Years Foundation Stage at Garfield Primary School
2018-2019
Reception Letters 2018-19
Parents key dates – AUTUMN 1 2018 – Summer 2019
EYFS Curriculum Newsletters 2018
At Garfield we offer high quality early education from Nursery through to Reception. The children learn through play in enabling environments and receive teaching through interactions and adult guided learning experiences as well as targeted phonics and maths teaching. The children have a baseline assessment when they start in the Nursery or Reception (or if starting in middle of term, when they start). Our provision is developmentally appropriate and the children’s progress is carefully tracked ensuring excellent progress is made by each child. We have special weeks when we focus on 1 or 2 children, thus ensuring rapid progress and the chance to follow the child’s interests even further. We ensure that by the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage children are ready to begin the national curriculum in Year 1.
Outdoor play and free flow
Characteristics of learning
Well-being and involvement
The 7 areas of learning PSED (Personal, social and emotional development)
Making relationships
-
- Here Elias and Ababkr find a common interest in superheroes and interact for the first time.
-
- Children begin to play in a group, extending play ideas
-
- Kamil joins in with a group of children he doesn’t usually play with as the game they are playing interests him.
-
- Children help and support each other.
-
- Igor asks Lexi to help him stick together his model.
Self-confidence and awareness
-
- Here Mohamed has separated from his main carer and is discovering what he enjoys to do.
-
- Children talk about their home photographs in front of their peers.
-
- Fatum is reading her independent work in front of the class.
Managing feelings and behaviour
-
- Here the children are learning to take it in turns and share
-
- A group children take turns playing ‘Duck, Duck, Goose.’
-
- Nia and Terri have set up a petting zoo with the school guinea pigs as the main attraction. The other children in reception take turns to buy a ticket and wait their turn to enter the petting zoo.
Communication and language
Listening and attention
Opportunities for social interactions and frequent short interactive carpet sessions allow children lots of chances to develop their listening skills.
Understanding
-
- Adults regularly share books with children
-
- to help develop their understanding of concepts and questioning.
Speaking
Using rhymes to promote learning new vocabulary.
Alex is instructing the teacher and a friend to help him build, the interest he has in construction has helped his speech development.
Physical development
Moving and handling
Play dough and other experiences that promote fine and gross motor control are constantly available for children.
-
- Health and self-care
-
- Tommy is independently having breakfast, spreading his topping on the toast.
-
- Children independently dress themselves in weather appropriate clothing.
Literacy
Writing
-
- Camilla and Kamil write letters to the three bears
-
- from Goldilocks and then post them in the post box.
-
- Grace is roleplaying as a doctor and writing the symptoms of her patient.
-
- Nia builds a pizza restaurant where she sells pizza using pretend money, she uses her Phonics knowledge to write a shop sign and then writes orders and receipts.
-
- Sebi uses his Phonics to write a shopping list, he buys his ingredients from the local shop and then makes his own pizza.
-
- Alehandra practices writing her Phase 3 Phonics sounds in salt.
Maths
-
- Mikail roleplays as a shopkeeper selling real fruit and vegetables, he writes a receipt with each item and the price, he then adds the prices and writes the total.
-
- Amina is roleplaying a doctor and she is checking what appointment she already has scheduled and then writes in another appointment in her diary.
-
- Exploring 2D shapes.
-
- Measuring in the environment.
-
- After conducting a traffic survey Nia adds up her total using a variety of methods including using her fingers, counting forwards on a number line and using cubes to add up bigger amounts.
Understanding the world
Some children were interested in gardens so we used books and the internet to research the life cycle of a seed, then the children planted their own beanstalk and cress seeds. They made observations about the changes they noticed.
There is also a gardening area in the outdoors which the children help to plant and maintain. They can observe the growth and changes of the plants. They also help to harvest the vegetables and enjoy eating them.
-
- Two children investigate the different types of homes, they record their findings on a chart.
-
- Writing numbers in Chinese
A group of children investigate water travel. They use lots of language to describe what is happening “It is filling up” “It’s empty.”
We followed a child’s interest in volcanoes, we read non-fictions books, researched using the internet then conducted our own scientific experiment to watch our own volcano erupt.
The children are given an opportunity to meet the schools residential Guinea pigs.
Expressive Arts and Design
-
- Exploring colour mixing in the rain.
-
- Aaliyah collects resources to make a bird’s nest.
Children sing familiar rhymes with musical instruments then then begin to make up their own songs.
The Early Years Curriculum at Garfield
Child development and learning in Nursery