Early Years at St Patrick’s Catholic Primary School
At St Patrick’s we believe that Jesus Christ is at the centre of all we do which is reflected in our mission statement ‘May Christ Be Seen In Us’. We are proud of our caring and inclusive ethos, creating a happy environment in which our children learn, flourish and develop their many gifts and talents, whatever they may be. We offer every child a broad, balanced and relevant Curriculum in order to meet their spiritual, emotional, moral, intellectual and physical needs supporting them to progress from their individual starting points into the next stage of their education.
What our parents say about St Patrick’s Early Years.
“My child feels extremely safe in school and cared for superbly. He loves attending St. Patrick’s and has made good friendships.”
“My daughter enjoys school and asks all weekend if it is Monday yet!”
“My child was not looking forward to starting school, however he enjoyed his transition day so much, he was very excited after that experience.”
“The way my child is learning her sounds and phonics is amazing. She loves it! She also loves trying to have a go at and word. Thank you.”
“The accompanying letter that came with my child’s first homework was great. It made me feel more relaxed and manageable. Also the first readers coffee morning was a great idea! Gives you chance to chat to other parents and exchange views. Again it helped me feel less pressure starting my child’s reading journey. Thank you!”
EY Curriculum Statement
Intent
As an Early Years team, we aim to:
- Provide a happy, safe and stimulating environment, where children can become confident, independent and resilient learners.
- Enable every child to reach their full potential, and to maximise their unique gifts.
- Guide our children to be supporting, kind, sharing and generous with one another and develop their social skills to build relationships with other children in our school.
- Provide an ambitious, inspiring and high-quality curriculum underpinned by the principals of Development Matters which enables children to develop a love of learning and a positive attitude to education.
Implementation
Our Nursery and Reception classes follow the framework laid down in the EYFS statutory framework which aims to support children’s development in seven areas of learning and development.
The three prime areas are:
- Communication and language
- Physical development
- Personal, social and emotional development
There are also four specific areas through which the prime areas are strengthened and applied:
- Literacy
- Mathematics
- Understanding the world
- Expressive arts and design
The teaching of these areas of learning is practical and playful with support and challenge from adults in class sessions, small group sessions and working with individuals. There is a combination of adult-led, teacher taught sessions as well as a wealth of stimulating continuous provision opportunities. Throughout all these areas of learning and at the heart of the EYFS Curriculum are the “Characteristics of Effective Learning”. At St Patrick’s, we strive to develop these key characteristics of “Playing and Learning”, “Active Learning” and “Thinking Critically” in order to give the children the skills that they will continue to draw upon throughout their development. All the crucial skills, knowledge and vocabulary that we teach are presented to the children throughout the year which encompasses a range of topics, which are designed with their interests in mind.
Our learning environments, both inside and outside are also adapted regularly to meet the different and developing needs of the children in our care. We aim to ensure that these areas are always stimulating and exciting and that, importantly, they are accessible to all children, regardless of where they are on their learning journey. The environments are developed to promote independence within our children and allow them to access the curriculum independently and confidently with the necessary level of support and challenge.
Within our EY Curriculum, children are assessed continuously through accurate and important observations. These provide us with information for future planning, not only for our individual classes but also for individual children’s next steps in their learning. They enable us, as EY practitioners, to ensure learning is embedded and consistent and that all children continue to make progress within our EY setting. St Patrick’s EY team strongly believes that the beginning of our children’s educational journey and igniting the flame for learning helps them develop key life skills such as independence; innovation; creativity, enquiry; analysis and problem solving.
Impact
The impact of our curriculum is measured by assessment procedures which allow us to measure outcomes against all schools nationally. We strive to ensure that our children’s attainment in prime and specific areas are in line with age related expectations or are achieving their potential considering the varied starting points of the children. We measure this carefully using a range of materials, but always considering Age Related Expectations. We intend that the impact is that children will be academically and physically prepared for life in further education and in Modern Britain and the world. We measure this not just by the work our children produce, but in the behaviours, we see each day in all our children on the playground, in corridors, and in the many roles we give them. The children don’t give up, are highly motivated to succeed and achieve and are equipped with all the personal skills to do this.
Nursery Curriculum Coverage
Reception Curriculum
Literacy – Early reading and writing
In Nursery we aim to build a love of reading and writing right from the start. Text and images are all around us and are some of the first print that a child sees. Encouraging children to enjoy stories, alone or with friends and family, can develop a love of reading. When a child can see words and pictures in a book they start asking questions. They begin to make a link with the pictures they see and can start to tell their own stories. Books with repetition are a great tool to develop children’s reading. Some Nursery favourites are The Three little pigs, The gingerbread man and Goldilocks and the three bears. Repeating what an adult says and linking it to pictures within a book helps them become familiar with stories, which they then begin to enjoy alone. Teaching children at a young age to write improves their reading skills by helping them recognise the connection between the letters they see and the sounds the letters make. Adults are instrumental in helping children link writing to reading and speaking at a young age. This is how children start to write, known as emergent writing. Emergent writing is the way many young children start writing. They start with scribbles and over time those random scribbles turn into letters. At this early stage they are only just beginning to understand writing letters but they become curious and want to mimic what they are seeing. Every mark a child in Nursery makes is a big achievement for them and if we praise and encourage this then children become all the more curious and willing to write.
Phonics
Phonics plays a big role in the development of reading and writing. It deals with the individual sounds that make up the words that we use every day. In Nursery we have a phonics session once a week in which we learn a new sound. Our school follows the Read Write Inc phonics programme. With each letter that we teach the children are taught the sound it makes and also the mantra we say when we write it. These are reinforced on a daily basis and the children are encouraged to use them when writing their names and mark making. The children love phonics and are always excited to discover new letter sounds. They then start to become more aware of letters in the environment and will begin to point out letters they recognise on displays or pick up our jelly letters and identify them. They also begin to recognise which letters they have in their name and then become more confident when attempting to write their name. In Nursery we also focus on developing children’s listening skills by identifying sounds in the environment, sounds our bodies can make, rhyme and alliteration and sounds that can be made by breaking words up into syllables. The children are very good at clapping the sounds in their names and also love our game of ‘Put your hands on your h-ea-d, b-a-ck, l-e-g. They are becoming more confident when dealing with familiar words and sounds. We love phonics in Nursery!
Mathematics is an integral part of our Nursery life. On a daily basis we count, identify numbers, write numbers and sing number rhymes. We have a daily maths session which begins with counting forwards and backwards to 10 and quick flash recall of numbers to 5 which will develop to 10 as the year progresses. We have a weekly maths focus and so far this year we have focused on number rhymes and language, numbers to 5, positional language and sorting by colour, size, shape and length. Children use a lot of mathematical language on a daily basis, sometimes without even realising it. Maths features in many aspects of a child’s daily life and helps children to become more familiar with mathematical concepts. In Nursery we love to sing number rhymes. Some of our favourite are 1,2,3,4,5 once I caught a fish alive, 5 little men in a flying saucer, 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed and 5 currant buns in a baker’s shop. Numberblocks is also a huge favourite of the childrens and at the end of each maths session we watch an episode on YouTube and they love it. We have a wide range of resources to help the children develop their maths skills including compare bears, numicon, dice, shapes, number jigsaws and our ordering caterpillars. The children are very good at repeating in their play what has been done during our maths session. Maths is all around us and encouraging children to see it and use it is a wonderful thing.