Speaking and listening are key skills for enabling children to communicate with others. Our children are encouraged to listen attentively and respond to what they hear with relevant questions, comments and actions when being read to and during whole class discussions and small group interactions. In Nursery, the children regularly take part in small group Speaking and Listening activities, which are designed to develop both receptive and expressive language, as well as developing each child’s confidence to speak in a group. As all children develop at different rates, some children in Reception may also be offered additional opportunities to take part in speaking and listening activities to boost their confidence and language skills.

We actively support the development of children’s language and communication skills, including their use and understanding of vocabulary through:

• playful interactions which encourage talking,
• open-ended questioning,
• modelling listening and turn taking in conversations,
• modelling speaking in whole sentences,
• speaking and listening activities in smaller groups,
• reading and listening to a range of books, rhymes and songs,
• asking ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions in different contexts,
• providing opportunities for children to follow instructions and to give instructions to others.

We refer children requiring additional support or assessment to the Speech and Language Therapy service and work in partnership to follow the recommendations provided by specialists, for example providing additional 1:1 support in school where required and supporting parents with ideas and information to develop their child’s language within the home environment.

We use our classroom rules to encourage a consistent approach to behaviour within our classroom and regularly use circle time to help resolve behaviour or friendship issues as they occur and help the children to develop their emotional literacy so they are able to talk about how they are feeling.

We use quality picture books and stories to explore a range of social and emotional issues, often returning to these books throughout the year.

We talk to the children about their successes and encourage them to reflect on their own learning and review how well things went. We model how as adults we can make mistakes or find things difficult and how we can overcome these problems. We use puppets and storytelling techniques to teach social skills, for example how to be a good friend.

We ensure that there is time and space for children to focus on activities and to develop their own interests and we design opportunities for children in groups to practise and develop their social interactions.

We plan activities which promote emotional, moral, spiritual and social development and provide positive images, for example, in books and displays that challenge children’s thinking and help them to embrace differences in gender, ethnicity, religion, special educational needs and abilities. We make links to our school values and talk about ways we can bring these values to life within our own classroom.

We explore and promote British Values through linking them to what we already do within the classroom. For example, to promote the value of democracy, we might vote as a class on changes to our role play area, or practise making decisions as a group when solving a construction problem, or share our views and ideas about ways to improve school life with the school council.

To support children’s physical development, we provide a range of opportunities for them to use gross (large-scale) movements and fine motor movements. All children in Nursery and Reception take part in a range of activities which helps them develop movement around important pivot points: shoulder, elbow, wrist and fingers; develop hand and finger strength and hand-eye coordination. Children also take part in ‘Funky Finger’ play dough activities which are designed to develop fine motor control including pincer movement and tripod grip.

We have a range of ride-on vehicles like scooters and tricycles and balance-ability bikes (no-pedal bikes) to help children develop co-ordination, control and the ability to safely negotiate space. Children also have access to large-scale wooden blocks and other apparatus so they can create their own obstacle courses to practise balancing and negotiating space, as well as managing risk.

In Reception, children take part in more formal PE sessions twice a week, some of which are led by specialist coaches e.g. dance, football, tennis etc.

In Nursery we focus on developing the children’s ability to discriminate sounds including: environmental sounds, instrumental sounds and body percussion sound, and on developing their general phonological awareness. We focus on listening to and remembering sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and voice sounds.

We begin to ‘write’ sounds using large scale movements in the air, and large-scale movements on different surfaces e.g. using paintbrushes onto paper, chalk on the ground. We then use smaller scale movements in different mediums e.g. using fingers in paint, sand, cornflower, couscous etc. Children then move onto writing with pencils on paper.

In Reception we continue to develop the children’s phonological awareness including rhythm and rhyme and move from oral blending and segmenting to written blending and segmenting.

We use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised as our phonics programme to teach children to hear, say, recognise, write blend and segment sounds from Phase 2 and 3. Phonics inputs are delivered as a whole cohort input. If any children are finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of whole cohort teaching and/or are struggling to orally blend sounds they are supported through small group and 1:1 ‘keep up’ sessions on a daily basis. We regularly assess children so that we are able to quickly identity any gaps in their learning and we then support them appropriately. Once the children can orally blend sounds they take part in three group practise reading sessions a week. They read books that are fully decodable so they experience early reading success and gain confidence that they are readers.

Reception take part in structured Literacy sessions usually 2 or 3 times a week. These sessions are designed to develop a shared love of reading, whilst developing the children’s ability to explore and understand stories at a deeper level. They also provide the inspiration and stimulus for a wide range of responses, including written responses, to the story. We encourage the children to demonstrate understanding of what has been read to them by retelling stories and narratives using their own words and recently introduced vocabulary and anticipate – where appropriate – key events in stories. We also encourage children to use and understand recently introduced vocabulary during discussions about stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems and during role-play.

Throughout their time in Nursery and Reception, we provide our children with as many opportunities as possible to develop their mathematical knowledge and skills in order for them to develop a deep understanding of numbers to 10, including the composition of each number, to be able to recognise quantities without counting up to 5 and automatically recall number bonds up to 5 (including subtraction facts) and some number bonds to 10, including double facts.

Children are also taught to verbally count beyond 20, recognising the pattern of the counting system; compare quantities up to 10 in different contexts, recognising when one quantity is greater than, less than or the same as the other quantity and explore and represent patterns within numbers up to 10, including evens and odds, double facts and how quantities can be distributed equally.

In order to teach Maths, we use resources from the White Rose Maths Hub and Numberblocks.  An important aspect of our approach to teaching maths is to actively develop our children’s ability to talk about maths when solving problems.

We provide opportunities for children to talk about past and present events in their own lives and in the lives of family members and to share with us family customs and traditions. We encourage them to know some similarities and differences between things in the past and now and understand the past through settings, characters and events encountered in books read in class and storytelling.

Understanding the world is all about investigating, exploring and making sense of the world around us and is a very important part of a child’s learning and development. Children in Nursery and Reception are given a range of opportunities to explore their immediate environment in order to observe and describe it using knowledge from discussion, stories, non-fiction texts and maps.

We teach children about different cultures and traditions through looking at cultural celebrations such as Chinese New Year, and through storybooks which explore the lives, beliefs and experiences of people from other countries, including for example the experiences of refugees. We help children to understand that we are all unique individuals and model ways to respect each other’s differences and to be sensitive to the different needs and interests of other people. We link our learning to British values and Christian values, through actively promoting these values within our classroom.

We encourage children to use our excellent outdoor provision in all weathers and provide many opportunities to do so. We grow potatoes and vegetables in our EYFS area, or visit our school garden, to help the children understand how to grow their own healthy food. We also learn about the animals and plants that live in our local environment and how to take care of them.

Through geographical topics we help children to develop a sense of place through exploring our own immediate environment including geographical features and landmarks, and then making comparisons with other places.

Our children are given lots of opportunities to explore the natural world around them, making observations and drawing pictures of animals and plants. We encourage children to use our excellent outdoor provision in all weathers and provide many opportunities to do so. We grow potatoes and vegetables in our EYFS area, or visit our school garden, to help the children understand how to grow their own healthy food. We also learn about the animals and plants that live in our local environment and how to take care of them.

The children learn about some similarities and differences between the natural world around them and contrasting environments, drawing on their experiences and what has been read in class. Through geographical topics we help children to develop a sense of place through exploring our own immediate environment including geographical features and landmarks, and then making comparisons with other places. We teach them about processes and changes in the natural world around them, including the seasons and changing states of matter.

In the EYFS, children experience a wide range of opportunities to safely use and explore a variety of materials, tools and techniques, experimenting with colour, design, texture, form and function construct with a purpose in mind, using a variety of resources. The design process is often intuitive and the making process is fluid. Children can independently access our creative area and choose their own resources to follow their own interests and ideas. They are encouraged share their creations, explaining the process they have used. Sometimes the context for design is set by the teacher in order to challenge and help progress the children’s planning and construction skills and resourcefulness. Children are encouraged to make use of props and materials when role playing characters in narratives and stories.

We encourage children to invent, adapt and recount narratives and stories with peers and their teacher. We teach children to sing a range of well-known nursery rhymes and songs and encourage them to perform songs, rhymes, poems and stories with others, and – when appropriate – try to move in time with music.