Chestnut Class

Welcome to Newlands Early Years. Our Early Years team is dedicated to creating a warm and caring atmosphere whilst striving for the highest standards of achievement for all children. We believe that the children should have the best possible start to their school life in which they encounter fun, engaging and challenging opportunities to develop their learning skills and experiences to deepen their understanding of the world around them. We want children to feel a sense of belonging within the school community and to develop a lifelong love of learning, that we hope they will continue to foster as they move through the school.

We provide a range of interesting and thought-provoking topics throughout each term, which are flexible and cater to the children's own interests to ensure that they engage fully in their learning. The aim is to engage the children based on their individual interests, which will therefore encourage child-led learning to further promote their knowledge and skills. Children have opportunities to develop their skills and learning mostly through child-initiated learning, which is enhanced by adults, as well as some adult-led learning which takes place in small groups. Whole class inputs are spread throughout the day to enable children to have maximum opportunities to explore their own interests and learning as part of their continuous provision.

The Early Years curriculum is divided into seven areas of learning; three Prime Areas and four Specific Areas, as detailed below:

Prime Areas of Learning

Communication and Language Development

This involves giving pupils opportunities to speak and listen in a range of situations and to develop their confidence and skills in expressing themselves.

Physical Development

This involves providing opportunities for pupils to be active and interactive, and to develop their co-ordination, control, and movement. Pupils must also be helped to understand the importance of physical activity as well as make healthy choices in relation to food.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

This involves helping pupils to:

• develop a positive sense of themselves and others
• form positive relationships and develop respect for others
• develop social skills and learn how to manage their feelings
• understand appropriate behaviour in groups
• have confidence in their own abilities

Specific Areas of Learning

Literacy

This involves encouraging pupils to read and write, both through listening to others reading, and being encouraged to begin to read and write themselves. Pupils have consistent access to a wide range of reading materials for example, books, poems, and other written materials to ignite their interest. There are also a wide range of activities to support the children's development of letter recognition, blending and letter formation, before the children move on to reading more confidently and begin to understand the purpose of reading and build on their phonics to begin to be able to write.

Drawing Club enables children to develop their ideas and imagination based on exposure to good quality texts, traditional stories and visual stimulus. It encourages children to explore vocabulary and immerse themselves in becoming story tellers themselves through creating their own drawings and secret codes based on the text-stimulus.

Mathematics

This involves providing pupils with opportunities to:

• practise and improve their skills in counting numbers, calculating simple addition and subtraction problems
• recognise the composition of numbers to 10, understand odd and even numbers and begin to find double numbers to 5
• describe shapes, space, and measures
• develop the ability to problem solve mathematically
• use concrete, pictorial and abstract materials to help develop and promote mathematical thinking and understanding

Understanding of the world

This involves guiding pupils to make sense of their physical world and their community through opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places, technology and the environment.

Expressive arts and design

This involves supporting pupils to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials. It involves providing pupils with opportunities and encouragement for sharing their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a variety of activities in art, music, movement, dance, role-play, and design and technology.

Teachers will also model and nurture each child's characteristics of learning, namely their abilities in:

• playing and exploring
• active learning
• creating and thinking critically

As part of our close partnership with parents, we meet regularly throughout the year to discuss each child’s strengths and areas for development and share key information about learning through one-to-one meetings and using Tapestry online learning journals. These journals also act as a wonderful tool for children to share their outside interests and experiences with their friends in the classroom. The children love to share what they have done at home and we at school love to share how well the children are developing personally and in their learning. It is very much a two-way communication tool.

Read, Write Inc.

Read Write Inc. is our school phonics scheme. Like all phonics schemes, it teaches children the sounds in English, the letters that represent them, and how to form the letters when writing. 

Read Write Inc. Phonics includes reading books written using only the letters they have learnt at each level (and a small number of separately taught tricky words). The children will quickly feel confident and successful. Children are assessed half-termly and then allocated into the correct ability group in the Spring Term, to enable them to achieve their full potential in both reading and writing. We encourage parents to read the phonics books sent home daily to help them to master their reading skills. At first books with no words are sent home to give the children an opportunity to tell the story in their own words, then they move on to blending books to support the children’s grasp of how to blend sounds learnt into words, then phonics story books are sent home for the children to practise sounding out and blending the words as well as learning to read tricky words.

We are very much looking forward to working with you and your child.  Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or queries.