Throughout Reception, we follow the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. Great emphasis is placed on the Characteristics of Effective Learning.

Playing and exploring – engagement.  This includes finding out and exploring, playing with what they know and being willing to ‘have a go’.

Active learning – motivation.  This includes being involved and concentrating, perseverance and enjoying achieving what they set out to do.

Creating and thinking critically – thinking.  This includes having their own ideas, making links and choosing ways to do things.

The curriculum is organised so that children learn through a combination of child and adult-led activities.  They have time each morning when they choose their own activities, selecting resources independently and setting themselves goals.  Phonics, reading, writing and mathematics are taught through adult-led activities in discrete lessons and reinforced in active learning sessions. Our core scheme for Phonics is currently Letters and Sounds.  In reading our phonics based reading scheme is Dandelion Readers which links to the sounds the children are learning   An important part of the week is ‘Welly Wednesday’ when the children spend the morning outside in almost any weather taking part in Forest School type activities. This experiential learning opportunity is further enhanced back in class where they report back on their learning and further develop their writing and maths skills.