Welcome to the

EARLY YEARS FOUNDATION STAGE

It is every child’s right to grow up safe, healthy, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and with economic

well-being. The overarching aim of the EYFS is to help young children achieve these five outcomes.

We will provide a broad and balanced curriculum that will enable each child to develop personally, socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically, creatively and intellectually to their full potential. Each child is valued as an individual and teaching and learning is based on the understanding that children develop at different rates.

At St Mary and St Benedict Catholic Primary School, we aim to:

· Provide a safe, challenging, stimulating, caring and sharing environment which is sensitive to the needs of the child, including those with additional needs.

· Provide a broad, balanced, relevant and creative curriculum that will set in place firm foundations for further learning and development in Key Stage 1 and beyond.

· Use and value what each child can do, assessing their individual needs and helping each child to progress.

· Enable choice and decision making, fostering independence and self-confidence.

· Work in partnership with parents and carers and value their contributions ensuring that all children, irrespective of ethnicity, culture, religion, home language, family background, learning difficulties, disabilities, gender or ability, achieve their full potential.

· Provide opportunities whereby children experience a challenging and enjoyable programme of learning and development.

Learning and Development

Learning and development is categorised into three prime areas of learning:

· Communication and language

· Physical development

· Personal, social and emotional development

Additionally there are four specific areas of learning:

· Literacy

· Mathematics

· Understanding the world

· Expressive arts and design

Achievement of these prime and specific areas of learning is by:

· Playing and exploring

· Active learning

· Creating and thinking critically

We very much welcome the contribution of carers and parent so please let us know if you have any comments, queries or ideas.

Read Write Inc.

As a school, we recognise the importance of effective phonics teaching and use the Read Write Inc. programme in order to deliver this.

Please click on the link below, which will take you to some helpful information for parents. The videos are particularly good for you to see the programme in action and maybe brush up on your own pronunciation of letter sounds. Of course though, videos will not answer your individual questions so please come and talk to the EYFS staff who are more than happy to help!

http://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/parents/

Parent video: How to say the sounds - YouTube