Academic Year 2024 – 2025
Learning Environment
The Foundation 1 classroom is bright and spacious. It is an ideal environment for early years children to explore and learn through purposeful play. The daily timetable enables your child to balance academic and creative tasks, both indoors and outdoors. With free-flow time as a central part of the daily timetable, your child can direct their learning and choose play activities that express their own interests and experiences. Part of the timetable invites the children to learn through a more structured approach, this group time allows the teacher to introduce the learning focus of phonics, mathematics, and literacy.
Timetable
8:30 – 8:40 / 12:20 – 12:30 | Registration |
8:40 – 8:50 / 12:30 – 12:40 | Welcome |
8:50 – 9:00 / 12:40 – 12:50 | Phonics |
9:00 – 9:10 / 12:50 – 1:00 | Literacy |
9:10 – 10:55 / 1:00 – 2:35 | Free-Flow |
10.55 – 11:05 / 2:35 – 2:45 | Tidy |
11:05- 11:15 / 2:45 – 2:55 | Mathematics |
11:15 – 11:25 / 2:55 – 3:05 | Story |
11.25 – 11.30 / 3:05 – 3:20 | Home |
Home Learning
In Foundation 1, your child’s teacher will work closely with you to support learning at home. You can significantly support your child’s development through your engagement in meaningful activities that encourage your child’s thinking and talking.
Based on evidence, the home learning activities that have the biggest impact are:
Reading, sharing books and going to the library,
Going out on visits,
Playing with print (letters and numbers),
Singing songs and nursery rhymes,
Drawing and painting (making meaningful marks).
Please view the learning activities presented to you each half. Time spent completing home learning with your child is an opportunity where they can feel listened to, their contributions valued, their ideas taken seriously and their language and thinking encouraged.
Class Dojo
We want to show you the learning and play activities that your child experiences in school. We use Tapestry and Dojo as platforms to celebrate children’s learning and development. These are secure online learning journals that build up a very special record of child’s experiences and development through observations that are shared in photos, videos, and comments. Please make sure you activate your Tapestry and Dojo accounts to view your child’s individual learning journey.
Talking Time
Talking, playing, and socialising with your child is the best way you can help them in their development. There are lots of basic communication and language skills involved first which children need to help them get ready for school.
Have some quiet time – no TV or mobile phones, this will help your child to listen and pay attention. Chat and sing together – this will help develop your child’s listening and speaking. Drop the dummy – this will help your child to have clearer speech. Praise your child – use positive words and praise when they do something well as this can help your child be more confident.
It can be tempting to just use books to read. Books can be explored in a number of ways and these suggestions outline other activities to encourage your child’s speech and language. Tell the story from the pictures rather than just reading the words. Encourage your child to retell the story, either with or without the pictures. Make comments about the pictures in the story e.g. “Wow! Look at the giraffe; he’s got a long neck”.
Our Stories
Each week, we share and explore a different story. A number of stories may be familiar to your child, through home experience or earlier years in our setting. In addition to sitting together and sharing the story as a group or one to one, we explore our chosen stories through inside, outside, and creative play. We plan and prepare our learning space to suit the story theme, inviting your child to engage in the repeated phrases, character play and the story setting through sensory experiences linking to sounds, touch, and observations. Sometimes, we even link our story to taste, where we act as Goldilocks and eat little bowls of porridge, or we catch the Gingerbread Man and eat him before the fox!
To start the year, we explore stories linking to our family and friends. This way we get to know more about your child as they share their experiences with connections to the story. We then continue the year and explore text on the season change, traditional tales, curious creatures, gardening, and under water. In your child’s diary, we list the stories we are due to share over the coming weeks, this way you can create discussion about the text at home.
Speech and Language
Our Speech and Language Therapist, Ms Harris, can provide guidance and support to parents and education staff that is specific to communication, speech, listening and attention.
Reminders
Please label all items of clothing with your child’s name, especially school jumpers. Items that have no named label will be taken to lost property.
If you pack your child a drink for the session, we only accept bottles of water. Any fizzy drinks will be stored away from the provision until the end of the session. We only offer water or milk.
We have timetabled Physical Education (PE) sessions following the Real Foundation scheme. These sessions aim to improve children’s movement and coordination. For the children to participate safely in these sessions, it is essential that they wear suitable footwear such as trainers or plimsolls.
For Health and Safety reasons, we do not allow the children to wear jewellery in school apart from earring studs or small objects of religious significance. No jewellery is allowed to be worn during physical activity due to safety reasons.
