Welcome to The Abbey Primary

1. Welcome toThe Abbey Primary EYFS Curriculum Evening for New Parents October 2016

2. Tonight's aims: To help you to understand the curriculum that your child will be covering in Reception. To understand how we teach in order to cover the requirements of the curriculum. To identify the key ways in which you can helpyour child at home and in school.

3. What is the Early Years Foundation Stage? The Early Years Foundation Stage (E.Y.F.S.) is the stage of education for children from birth to the end of the Reception year. It is based on the recognition that children learn best through play and active learning.

4. The Reception Curriculum

5. Characteristics of Effective Learning

6. The importance of play “Adults who help children to play are adults who help children to learn.”

7. What have we been doing? • Everyone has made a great start to the new school year, making new friends and meeting up with others from nursery. • We have been getting to know your children and helping then to settle into school life. • We have also been completing a baseline assessment for each child.

8. The Baseline Assessment • The purpose of the baseline assessment is to find out what the children already know and can do. • This gives us an official baseline assessment and helps us to know each child’s starting point, so that we can plan their next steps and focus future learning on their individual needs.

9. On-Going Assessment We assess your child’s progress throughout the year in order to move their learning on and plan their next steps. • Observations of embedded learning. • Talking and interacting with them in their play. • Small group activities. • WOW moments from home and other adults in school.

10. How do we share information? • An important part of the EYFS is your knowledge about your child’s learning and development. We want to work in partnership with you supporting your child’s learning and celebrating their achievements.

11. The Learning Journal Each child has their own “Learning Journal” where we keep evidence of their learning. This year we are introducing Tapestry which is an online Learning Journal. Tapestry Is fully secure and only password holders can access the features and parents only can access their own child’s Learning Journal. The school will upload photos, videos and observations of your child’s learning experiences. Parents have opportunity to write back or input examples of what your child is doing outside the school day in terms of their learning.

12. Individual Display Boards Each child has their own individual display board. These are used: • By the children to display anything that they are proud of and that they want to share with the class. • The teachers use it to display next steps so everybody who is involved knows what their next steps are. • It is also used to display WOW moments that happen in and out of school.

13. EYFS Profile Evidence from the learning journey and ongoing assessments throughout the year builds up to a final assessment called the Foundation Stage Profile. Here judgements are made to see if the children have met the Early Learning Goals.

14. Reading In Reception In its simplest form phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds. Sounds are taught in a specific order. Phonics is central to learning in reading and writing. Phonics

15. What we use to teach phonics

16. Terminology - A quick quiz • On your tables there is a sheet with some terms that can be found in the letters and sounds document. • In pairs, groups or on your own have a go.

17. Terminology explained • Phoneme – smallest unit of sound • Grapheme – written representation of a phoneme • Digraph– two grapheme (letters) that make one sound (sh, ch, th, ph) • Trigraph – three graphemes (letters) making one sound igh, air, ure • CVC– consonant vowel consonant (cat, pain) • Schwa– the “uh” vowel sound that is put on the end of words or some consonants (b, g, d). Schwa

18. Using Pure Phonemes (sounds) http://mrthorne.com/introduction-to-phonemes/

19. Phase 1-4 PHASE 1 SKILLS PRACTISED THOUGHOUT

20. Blending (for reading) • Starts with Oral Blending • Give examples – sound talk • Recognising letter sounds in a written word, c-u-p sh-ee-p • Building/ Merging the words together in the right order to pronounce the word cup, sheep Game! Phase 2 Buried Treasure

21. Segmenting (for spelling) • Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word and writing down the letters for each sound to form a word • Breaking a word down into the sounds to spell a word Game! Phase 3 Full circle

22. Tricky words • What are tricky words? • Words that don’t make sense when you sound them out. • In each phase a selection of tricky words is taught. First children learn to read them (learning by flashcards/memorisation/visual techniques/mnemonics), then in the following phase the focus is on spelling them. Regular practise is key.

23. How to help at home • Sharing, reading and discussing books (and any other reading material – instructions, magazines, recipes, signs etc.) • Modelling reading and writing for purposes (shopping lists, reminders, notes etc.) • Oral blending games (I can see a f..l..ow…er…). • Finding tricky words in books, signs newspaper and magazines. • What we will send home later in the term: Flashcards for the GPCs taught. A school reading scheme book matched to their developing skills. • PHONICS for FAMILIES (Tuesdays after half term)

24. Writing In Reception Funky Fingers Mark making Writing

25. What is Funky Fingers? • Funky fingers is a daily session run to improve fine motor skills giving a focused input on the children's hands, fingers and grip. • We set up a series of activities which encourage the children to use their own fingers or to manipulate apparatus or resources to pick up small objects. • Alongside this we run dough gym which is an effective program for children to work on their upper body and gross motor development.

26. Mark Making and Developmental Writing

27. Letter Formation • Initially we focus on lower case letters and that is what we want to see the children using in their writing. • We encourage the use of capital for names and when we are teaching sentences we talk about how and why we use capital letters.

28. Genres of Writing In reception the genres of writing that we concentrate on are: • Lists, • Labels, • Captions, • Stories, • Postcards, • Rhymes and alliteration.

29. How to help at home? • Encourage mark making of any type. • Ask the children to tell you what they have written to encourage them to distinguish between pictures and writing. • Encourage correct formation – starting points use of lowercase.

30. Maths in Reception Activities: Games Rhymes and Songs Counting Ordering Addition Subtraction Resources: • Numicon • Magnetic numerals • Unifix • Compare bears • Rekenreks • Number lines, number tiles, cards • Peg and pattern boards • Playdough mats

31. Maths in Reception • Understand the 5ness of 5! • Recognise numbers • Order numbers • 1 more 1 less • Practical maths • Number rhymes

32. Maths Curriculum In the EYFS Curriculum, Mathematics has 2 strands: Numbers Counting, ordering, understanding place value, matching numerals and amounts, comparing(more/less/same), calculating. Mark making for maths (recording their mathematical thinking). Problem solving and real life applications/puzzles. Shape, Space and Measure Comparing, estimating and measuring length, height, capacity, weight (mass). Time (daily routines, days of the week, months, seasons, minutes, hours, seconds). Positional language. 2D and 3D shape. Pattern. Problem solving and real life applications/puzzles. Each week a particular topic or focus is taken, linked to just one or two statements from Development Matters EYFS document.

33. Thank you for coming Feel free to ask questions. Our email addresses are: ecrosfield@shaftesburyabbey.dorset.sch.uk adavies@shaftesburyabbey.dorset.sch.uk