Early Years
Early Years Foundation Stage
We know that if we get it right in the Early Years we give every child their best ever starting point for success in the future. We offer a very broad and balanced curriculum that values every area of the curriculum equally. We strive to provide inspiring environments that create awe and wonder that we develop alongside children’s interests, that enables them to become confident lifelong learners. Quality adult interactions and positive relationships with the children form the basis of all learning and are key for developing communication, language and imaginative play. Close partnerships with our families are integral to piecing it all together.
Guidance to your child's Learning and Development in the Early Years Foundation Stage.
Expected Early Learning Goals and the EYFS
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Nursery Goals
Here are the 12 goals we set for our Nursery children. We have created a creative, ambitious, inclusive curriculum which ignites a child's passion of learning and to help develop their enquiring minds.
Nursery Goals
Nursery Goals
Reception Goals
Here are the 12 goals we set for our Reception children. We have created a creative, ambitious, inclusive curriculum which ignites a child's passion of learning and to help develop their enquiring minds.
Reception Goals
Reception Goals
At West Croft we have developed a systematic phonics programme using the use the Letters and Sounds letter order. We have aligned our reading books to run alongside the programme to ensure all children are reading correctly matched reading books to their phonics ability.
Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource which aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills.
There are six phases: starting with teaching phonic skills for children in nursery, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
Phase One (Nursery/Reception) | Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as or, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
Phase Four (Reception/Year 1) 4 to 6 weeks | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) | Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |