St Joseph's Roman CatholicPrimary School
To grow daily in God's love, blossoming in His will
EYFS
Welcome to the EYFS class page, I hope to update this page regularly with pictures of our learning in the Foundation class of reception "chicks" and nursery "bunnies".
Pictures can also often be found in the gallery.
A typical day in the EYFS class:
We pride ourselves in following a child-centred approach in the EYFS class and try to meet the individual needs of all children wherever possible. With this in mind there is a great deal of flexibility in our planning, but we do tend to have familiar daily routines as follows:
9.45-9.55 children arrive in school and are taught to develop independence in putting their book bags and water bottles in the appropriate boxes before making their lunch choices. Carefully selected and enhanced learning resources are available for children to access from the moment they arrive- we call this the continuous provision. They also take part in self-registration, finding their name card and adding to the display, introducing signing in for the reception children during the Autumn term and gradually in the Spring or Summer term for the nursery children.
Every child has a named key person and time is given for each child to spend time with their key person for an individual welcome or short group discussion at the beginning of the day.
9.00: Once everyone is settled, we begin our day with a morning prayer. This is followed by separate nursery and reception phonics teaching sessions. The children then access a combination of adult led activities and self-chosen learning activities in our indoor and outdoor areas.
Children in the EYFS have a morning snack of milk (or water) and fruit, always supervised by an adult, either in a large group or in small groups eating and chatting at the table and increasing their skills of independence and awareness of the need to recycle our plastic waste and compost our fruit waste. On a regular basis, we offer other snacks such as warm toast which they butter themselves or crackers and cheese spread and other seasonal treats.
11.00-11.40: The children are all involved in tidying our indoor and outdoor learning areas and grow to love the responsibility of doing this. We will often have a short playtime to enable the children to have a run around in the fresh air before gathering together indoors for a short, focussed teaching session with reception and nursery in separate groups. The focus of this varies daily and based around the different curriculum areas.
11.45: The morning session ends by praying a simple version of the Examen, when we say our "Thank you", our "Sorry" and our "Promise" to God, this is followed by our lunchtime prayer. The "morning only" nursery children then go home while others join the reception children in the dining hall for lunch followed by playtime/exercise time.
1.00pm: The afternoon session begins at 1.00pm with "wake and shake" followed by separate short whole reception and nursery maths teaching sessions before more adult-led and self-chosen learning activities using the indoor and outdoor environments.
3.05pm: Before we know it, it's all hands on deck to tidy the indoor and outdoor areas ready for story time and our home time prayers.
Regular weekly events are as follows:
Library book exchange is on Tuesday morning each week. (Friday for those who don't attend nursery on Tuesdays)
Wellies and Waterproofs Wednesday is an opportunity for all children to take full advantage of our developing outdoor grassy area for lots of fun gross motor skills development and team work activities.
Reading book collection for reception children will be on Thursday each week, with new books sent home on Fridays.
Whole school worship and celebration of achievements assembly is held every Friday morning.
We refer to our Fridays as Physical Fridays, with all children participating in PE lessons and/or more outdoor physical activities in our wellies and waterproofs.
A more detailed general weekly timetable can be found in the link below with the flexibility to allow us to follow the interests and engagements of the children and adapt things whenever necessary. :
First days in our new EYFS classroom and outdoor area September, 2023
We are so excited to welcome our children into the brand new EYFS classroom this week, the staff and children started the new school year with huge smiles, chatter and enthusiasm. A wonderful, happy time in the history of St Joseph's!