Robins
EYFS
The Early Years Foundation Stage is the stage in your child's learning from birth to 5 years old. This is the time in school that we call Early Years. Children will have a range of experiences and opportunities to gain everyday skills and develop in a variety of areas of learning. We follow the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework.
Our single year group Reception class is taught on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday by Mrs Hannah Hodgkinson and Mrs Mary Holden on Thursday and Friday. Throughout the week the class is supported by teaching assistant Mrs Catherine Cox.
Mrs Hodgkinson and Mrs Holden work together closely to ensure that the children have a smooth transition into school and settle well into our nurturing and exciting learning environment. Our Reception environment is made up of two outdoor areas and a beautiful, light and airy classroom. One of these outdoor areas is attached and is always accessible for the children to work in throughout the school day.
In our class we enjoy a variety of adult led and self-chosen indoor and outdoor activities. Inside and outside are organised into areas of continuous provision to enable the children to access and make good progress within the play-based Foundation Stage Curriculum. Our continuous provision areas are enhanced to ensure that children remain motivated, happy and excited to learn.
Taught sessions include phonics, literacy, maths, individual reading, R.E and a topic focused activity that changes on a daily basis.
Our Curriculum
We follow our own Cockerham EYFS curriculum which outlines the knowledge and skills the children will develop over their time in our EYFS class. This has been developed using Development Matters 2021. It covers the statutory programmes of study from the statutory framework for early years (2021) and allows us to plan purposeful and developmentally appropriate activities to enhance and support the children's learning.
A lot of our work from the provision in the classroom is recorded using Tapestry Learning Journal. If you would like to see your child's learning journey, and comment on any of the records, please log in through Tapestry for up-to-date images and records.
Learning activities are planned to ‘wow’ and enthral the children in order to move their learning forward and meet individual learning needs. The children’s interests and ideas are at the centre of our teaching and therefore our long term and medium term plans are adaptable. We plan for spiritual, moral and cultural development and incorporate Modern Foreign Languages into our daily routines. We provide the children with first hand experiences where possible, including educational visits and visitors coming into school. We want our children to become happy, confident, ambitious, independent learners who feel valued as individuals. Our teaching is underpinned by our school vision ‘Where a love of learning grows, growing in knowledge, growing in faith, growing in God's love.’ We love to learn outside as much as possible and utilise our beautiful surroundings.
We have P.E. on a Tuesday afternoon and a Wednesday morning where we cover a range of skills linked to dance, yoga, games and gymnastics. The children receive homework of reading and phonics practise.
Useful Documents
What to expect when in the Early Years Foundation Stage
Phonics: How to pronounce pure sounds
We value our links with parents and the wider school community and plan regular events throughout the year to share learning and celebrate achievements together. Thank you to those of you who were able to join us at our Autumn and Spring Coffee afternoons. The children love having all of you together in school.
We have been very busy since the start of school, as you can see below:
Making Firework shapes in English
Autumn Coffee Afternoon
Making Fruit Kebabs
Signs of Autumn Walk
Summer 1 2023
We are learning about farms and then contrasting the farm with other habitats. The children have designed and then built their own farms using their knowledge of what we would find on the farm. We learnt about animals that live on the farm and the products that we get from them. The children loved welcoming our class cow Nora and having a go at milking. Our outside area became a farm shop where the children enjoyed selling fruit and vegetables and designing their own tea party recipes. We are learning about lifecycles and have our own caterpillars to look after and observe. We are finding out about machines on the farm and how these and farm jobs have changed over time.
Seasonal change. Robins class love the Spring!
Spring 2 2023
We are learning about castles. We have found out about the different parts of a castle and what happens there. We built our own castles and thought about ways we could create a moat, turrets and arrow slits. The children had amazing ideas and loved using the junk modelling and experimenting with different ways to fasten the different parts. We learnt about Coats of Arms and what the different colours and symbols represent and then we designed our own to reflect our likes and dislikes. There has been lots of dressing up, designing crowns using different materials and lots of imaginative play. We looked at the painting 'Castle and Sun' by artist Paul Klee and then we used shapes to create our own version of the painting.
Spring 1 2023
This half term our theme is 'What is out there?'. We began by thinking about where we live on planet Earth. We decided that we would like to build a rocket so that we could go and explore what is out there above the clouds. The children had fantastic, creative ideas and gathered resources and materials to build a rocket. They are enjoying dressing up as astronauts and creating their own space adventures.
Autumn 2 2022
This half term we are learning about celebrations. We have found out about the different ways in which we celebrate and about different celebrations around the world. This week we focussed on weddings and today we held our own Robins class wedding. We made flowers, confetti, rings, danced, wrote guest lists, ate cake and had a wonderful time! We found out about lots of different traditions. We are going to be comparing this to a Muslim wedding and a Hindu wedding ceremony later this week.
Our wedding day
Welly Wednesdays
We love our welly Wednesday sessions. In November we tidied our planters and pulled out some of the weeds. We got very soggy in the rain but had a fun afternoon!
Spring term coffee afternoon
A huge thank you to everyone that attended our Spring term coffee afternoon. The children loved sharing their learning with you and showing you around our environment.
