Teachers:

Mrs Bradley (RBr) - EYFS Lead and PSHE Team

Miss Shaw (RSM - 3 days) - 

Mrs Murphy-O'Connor (RSM - 2 days) - PSHE Team

Miss Bernstein (RB) - Maths Team - EYFS focus

 

Teaching Assistants:

Mrs Carter - (TA3 across Reception - based in RBr)

Mrs Jones- (TA in RSM)

Mrs Moghadasnia- (TA in RBr)

Miss Craven- (TA in RB)

At Bowdon Church School, our aim in Reception is to 'activate their own natural desire to and build strong foundations for good future progress through school and later life.' 

We know that every child is unique. In collaboration with parents, we enable our pupils to be resilient, confident and self-assured learners by sparking their curiosity. At Bowdon Church School, we provide a nurturing, creative and inclusive environment which enables our pupils to flourish spiritually, emotionally, academically and socially. 

There are 7 areas of learning and development which we focus on in the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. These seven areas are:

Communication and language, Physical development, Personal, social and emotional development, Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World, Expressive arts.

Communication and Language, Physical Development and Personal, Social and Emotional development are the three prime areas. These are crucial in our Early Years environment for igniting children’s curiosity, building their capacity to learn and form relationships and thrive.

A typical day in Reception includes:

• Daily Phonics

• Daily Maths

• Daily favourite five (during snack time)

• Daily story time (Home time)

• Re, PSED, understanding the world, expressive arts input each week

• Literacy writing focus each week.

• Physical development incorporated daily – gross motor, fine motor, activities

The power of continuous provision

• Our indoor and outdoor learning environment is designed to encourage children to extend, challenge and deepen their understanding.

• These environments allow for independence, curiosity and hands on play-based learning.

• Challenges are provided in each area to extend their learning.

• Adult engagement in these areas allow us to enhance our provision through knowing when to stand back and observe, question the children to extend and develop their learning, model and intervene to support teaching and learning.

Assessment

We measure the impact of our Early Years Curriculum in the following ways:

· Daily observations

∙ Interaction and feedback from teachers on the progress of each child

∙ Baseline assessment (Statutory and teacher led)

∙ Three assessment windows throughout the year to assess the impact of the teaching and learning

∙ Tracking their progress throughout the year and share at parents evening/reports

∙ Evidence of their ‘wow’ moments in their online learning journey on Tapestry

∙ Floor book and writing learning journey showing the progression

Learning to read is one of the most important things your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible. We follow the Read, Write Inc scheme for reading. Please see the dedicated RWI page for more information about it.

We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.

After our children have settled socially and emotionally into Bowdon's routines, we complete a phonics assessment with them. This is to identify what skills they already have and where we need to take their learning. After this, we group children according to their existing skills and will continue to assess every half-term going forwards. 

Phonics is taught for 40 minutes, 5 times a week. 

We send books home every Thursday, for them to be returned the following Tuesday. We ask that you write a small comment in the reading record that will accompany the books, just indicating how they read at home. It may be to highlight a specific word/ sound that they are struggling with or it may be to say they seemed confident with everything!