Early Years Foundation Stage

The EYFS framework sets out the statutory requirements for learning and development for children up to and including Reception Year, ( birth to 5) . Our curriculum is built around this framework

• At Vale Primary we have planned an ambitious curriculum that covers the 7 areas of learning: Personal, Social and Emotional, Physical Development, Communication and Language, Literacy, Mathematical Development, Knowledge of the world, Expressive Art and Design. This prepares our pupils for their onwards learning journey into Year 1 and beyond.
• We have a balance between teacher- led, discrete lessons on the carpet and child-led learning through play in our continuous provision each day.
• We believe that it is age appropriate and effective for our Reception pupils to learn through play. We don't have playtime breaks because we have designed our daily timetable to give pupils time to engage with their self-chosen, play activities so that they can engage in uninterrupted learning through play. 
• In order to facilitate learning through play we spend a long time creating our indoor and outdoor environments providing the children with a range of open-ended resources and quality continuous provision that they can select each day.
• Enhanced Provision: We also spend time planning enhancements to what is always available in our provision. These enhancements can be linked to our discrete planned lessons or added to enable our pupils to follow their own interests.
• In planning our EFYS Curriculum we have backwards planned so that we ensure that the learning in Year reception prepares the children for the planned learning experiences in Key stage 1. We ensure that our pupils have the pre-requisite skills and knowledge to allow them to be successful in their transition into Key stage 1 and that we have built strong foundations in terms of our pupils' attitudes to learning and foundational knowledge of phonics, reading, writing and mathematics so that they are enabled to be successful, independent learners.
• Although our 7 areas of learning do not directly map to the subjects in Key Stage 1 following our Bailiwick Curriculum, The Big Picture, our Reception pupils begin their learning in those subjects when they start with us in Year Reception. We have a carefully sequenced curriculum map that demonstrates how what we learn in Reception continues and is built on in Key Stage 1.

The following discrete, teacher-led lessons take place each week...

Daily Phonics lessons following Little Wandle, Revised letters and Sounds.

Daily Maths lessons which are based on White Rose Maths. Our maths lessons are highly interactive with our pupils all actively involved and using a range of equipment and models to support them in developing a strong understanding of numbers and how they are composed. Their understanding is further enhanced and embedded through the use of Early Number Sense. The Early Number Sense programme begins with children subitising one and two and develops their understanding of all the quantities to ten. The programme develops subitising, manipulating, and partitioning of numbers to 10 and supports children to see their different properties.

Literacy Lessons are three times a week. These lessons are focused on quality texts that we have chosen to ensure that we have a diverse range of books in Year Reception including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and books that challenge stereotypes. Phonics is applied in these lessons with teachers modelling blending to read and segmenting to spell. Talk for Writing is used to build pupils' love of stories, ability to retell stories and to use story language and to support our pupils in innovating stories.

We have brought joy to our Literacy lessons by using Greg Bottrill's Drawing Club Approach. Drawing Club is an engaging approach to encourage children to respond to text's imaginatively. Through Drawing Club we introduce new, exciting language to the children and our pupils mark-make, draw and write whilst having fun. It is amazing how quickly our pupils make progress with their writing through Drawing Club and they are always very enthusiastic about it!

As we move through the year there are increased expectations of what our pupils are able to do in response to the texts we are reading, with follow-up work including varied writing tasks. We aim for our pupils to be able to write independent sentences that can be read by others by the end of their Reception year with spelling that is phonetically plausible and using high frequency words that are spelt correctly.

Weekly Music Lesson. Our music lessons are planned using Get Set for music. The lessons are highly engaging and interactive with the children listening, singing, performing and composing throughout the year. The children will learn to recognise similarities between pieces of music, learn to talk about music and express their preferences. Our pupils learn about dynamics, temp, pulse and rhythm and learn to play a range of untuned percussion instruments.

Weekly Circle Time Lessons (PSED). These link to Vale Primary's; Ready, Respectful, Safe. We are providing our pupils with the necessary skills to equip them to manage their feelings and behaviour and enabling them to understand their self-worth and how they need to look after themselves to keep healthy, physical, emotional and mental health. Whilst we have weekly discrete circle time lessons our learning linked to PSED occurs throughout the day, everyday. We use the Colour Monster stories in school to support the children to identify and name their emotions. We have an emotional check-in basket placed on each class teacher's desk.

Our other discrete lessons each week form the foundations for Art, Design and Technology, History, Geography and Science. These lessons are delivered through teacher-led carpet sessions but learning continues with hands-on follow up tasks (for example all of the children experiencing colour mixing paints on perspex or testing objects to see if they sink or float). Learning continues through the use of enhanced provision added to our quality offer of indoors and outdoors continuous provision.

Weekly PE lessons which include dance, using small equipment, climbing on large apparatus, games as well as swimming lessons in the summer term. These lessons are based on Get Set for PE.