St Gerard’s Catholic Primary School

Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)

“The goal of early childhood education should be to activate the child’s own natural desire to learn. ”

Maria Montessori

Vision Statement

Throughout our EYFS, it is our vision for our children to aspire to be the best they can be, to be enthused with high levels of curiosity, imagination, creativity, resilience, confidence and concentration.

Our aim is to provide an outstanding Catholic education encouraging our children to ‘Walk then as Children of the Light’. Within the Early Years Foundation Stage we aim to provide a happy, safe and stimulating environment, which allows all children to feel secure and valued and therefore ready and eager to learn.

At St. Gerard’s we recognise that every child who enters our school is a unique individual and therefore aim to provide a rich and exciting curriculum and opportunities for all.

Implementation

We recognise children’s prior learning and various starting points, and create a holistic curriculum that gives children

A wealth of rich language opportunities to develop their communication skills.
Opportunities to recap and retrieve knowledge
Cultural capital, which helps them to progress and achieve success now, and in their future
A wide knowledge of social rules and conventions
The currency of play

Our curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced and designed to foster the characteristics of effective learning through a balance of child-initiated and adult-led activities, using continuous play and small group tasks.

Our curriculum is built around half termly themes. We aim to ensure that children acquire a wide vocabulary, communicate effectively and, in Reception, secure a knowledge of phonics, which gives them the foundations for future learning, especially in preparation for them to become confident and fluent readers.

The Prime areas are:

Communication and Language
Physical Development
Personal, Social and Emotional Development

The specific areas are:

Literacy
Mathematics
Understanding the World
Expressive Arts and Design

For more information about the EYFS Framework, please click here:

Impact

From their own starting points, children will make excellent progress academically, socially and spiritually, developing a sense of themselves so that they are well prepared for the transition into Key Stage 1.

Our children will demonstrate high levels of engagement in activities, developing their speaking and listening skills, enabling them to access more areas of learning and communicate to both adults and children. Children will develop skills across all areas of the curriculum including Literacy, Mathematics and Physical Development using these in different ways.

Children will have developed a wider sense of the world around them and can draw on these experiences during interactions with others and link this to their new learning.

Our children will have developed their Characteristics of Learning and be able to apply their knowledge to a range of situations making links and explaining their ideas and understanding.

Our children will be successful learners and fully prepared for the next stage of their education as they transition from Foundation Stage to Year One. We will also aim to help children to make sense of the world around them to develop tolerance, compassion and an understanding of their rights and the rights of others in an ever evolving world.

At the end of Foundation stage, our children will have developed essential knowledge and skills required for everyday life and lifelong learning. Children at St.Gerard’s will be well rounded, happy, inquisitive and successful learners.

Phonics

At St. Gerard’s we follow Sounds~Write which is a quality first phonics programme, and is probably the finest system of literacy tuition in the English language.

Parents can complete this FREE Sounds~Write online course which will support you to support your child’s reading at home in the best way possible Click here to complete!

The four key concepts children need to learn are:

letters are symbols that represent sounds
sounds can be spelled using 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters
the same sound can be spelled in different ways
the same spelling can represent different sounds

The three keys skills children need to master are:

blending
segmenting
phoneme manipulation

Children in our Foundation Stage begin with the Initial Code where they practice all 3 key skills whilst learning the 1:1 sound-spelling correspondences, securing their understanding that letters are symbols that represent sounds. This builds up trust in a truly reversible system, enabling them to decode and encode a wide range of words and sentences. At first, children learn to read and write simple one syllable words with a CVC structure. Complexity of word structure systematically builds up so that children apply their code knowledge to monosyllabic words with up to 6 sounds.

Once the Initial Code has been mastered, children continue to practice all key skills whilst learning the Extended Code which explores key concepts 2, 3 and 4.

There is lots of information and some useful video clips for parents at:

https://www.sounds-write.co.uk/

If you’re not sure how to say the sounds of the Initial Code accurately, listen to the delightful way they are spoken by children at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Primary School and copy them.

https://www.st-thomasaquinas.co.uk/sounds-write/

30 Hours Funding

We have a limited number of paid and funded 30 hours childcare places at St. Gerard’s.

Eligibility is available for parents on the HMRC 30 hours childcare website: https://www.gov.uk/30-hours-free-childcare

If you are eligible, please follow the steps carefully and once completed, you will be given an 11-digit validation code which you will need to use as proof to a member of our office staff prior to your child starting Nursery.

Please note: there is a £2:10 daily charge to cover staffing costs over lunchtime. This is payable on ParentPay.