Foundation
“Every child deserves the best possible start in life and support to their full potential. A child’s experience in the early years has a major impact on their future life Chances.” Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
Early childhood is the foundation on which children build the rest of their lives. It is not just a preparation for the next stage but is vitally important in itself. For young children there is no distinction between work and play. Learning for young children is a rewarding and enjoyable experience in which they explore, investigate, discover, create, rehearse, repeat, revise and consolidate their developing knowledge, skills, understanding and attitudes. During the foundation stage, many of these aspects of learning are brought together effectively through playing and talking.
The Team
Hello and welcome to Foundation Stage page!
In Foundation we have the following staff:
- Foundation (Moon Bear) FHK Mrs Kassiri
- Foundation (Polar Bear) FLM Mrs Malkin
- Foundation (Panda Bear) FRD Miss Dominey
Bishop Aldhelm’s EYFS Curriculum Statement
In line with our whole school vision we believe that all children are loved by God and united in learning.
Our INTENTION in our Early Years Foundation Stage (Pre-School and Foundation) is to ensure that every child feels, safe, happy and secure by creating an inclusive and welcoming ethos in which every child is valued and treated as a unique learner. This will enable every child to make progress and achieve excellence in their learning.
We intend to set the foundations which will help our children to become emotionally and physically healthy and, through their ‘have-a-go’ attitude, will have the tools to embrace challenges and overcome barriers. Upon these foundations, we strive to build confident life-long learners who have a thirst for discovering and finding out.
Our children will develop the skills of independence, resourcefulness and resilience within their learning and these will be encompassed within the school’s four values of Love, Inspiration, Courage and Unity.
Our curriculum is set on the principle that children learn best when they are settled and comfortable within the learning environment and that a child-centred approach for young children is crucial for their development and success. Therefore, our teaching and learning is carefully crafted to reflect the needs and interests of our children, with imagination and creativity woven throughout. Our practitioners are constantly evaluating and reviewing their practise to ensure excellence across the Early Years Foundation Stage.
Every practitioner is determined to ensure that our children are ready for the next stage of their learning: in our pre-school we make sure our children are prepared for Foundation; in Foundation we make sure our children our ready for Key Stage One. Thus our curriculum has a clear and strong drive around developing the Prime Areas, with a particular focus on Communication and Language. Running parallel with this, is the solid and robust teaching of the Specific areas of learning in which we aim to guarantee that 100% of children leave EYFS having achieved the Early Learning Goal in reading and having fostered a love of reading in order to open them up to the world around them.
Please see link below for our full statement.
Essential Letters and Sounds is the scheme that we use at Bishop Aldhelm's to support the systematic teaching of phonics. Children begin the Essential Letters and Sounds programme at the start of the Foundation year and continue across Key Stage 1 (Years 1 and 2). Every child in Foundation and Year 1 has a 20/25 minute phonics session every morning. For children who are not secure in their phonics leaving Year 1, individual interventions are put in place to tailor their support to develop their early reading skills.
The Essential Letters and Sounds programme is separated into six Phases - your child's teacher will be able to tell you which Phase your child is currently working on.
For each Phase there is a brief explanation of what is taught and a selection of resources (word cards, games & record sheets) which you can be used to support your child's learning.
If you require any further support, please come into school and speak with your child's class teacher or our English Leader, Mrs Davis.
Phonics Glossary
We hope the following glossary is useful to you when using our Letters and Sounds pages. Always feel free to come in and talk to us if you require any further support.
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blending |
Blending is the skill of joining sounds together to read words. Children are taught to say the separate sounds in a word and to then blend them together to decode the word. |
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digraph |
A digraph is a sound that is represented by two letters e.g. the sound 'a' in rain is represented by the digraph 'ai'. |
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grapheme |
A grapheme is a visual representation of a sound e.g. a letter or a group of letters. Some sounds are represented by a single letter whilst others are represented by more than one letter. |
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phoneme |
A phoneme is a unit of sound e.g. the word 'cat' contains three phonemes; c - a - t. | ||
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segmenting |
Segmenting is the opposite of blending. Children are taught to segment a word into its separate sounds in order to spell it. | ||
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split digraph |
A split digraph is a digraph that is separated by other letters e.g. the sound 'a' in the word take is represented by the split digraph a-e. | ||
Pronouncing Phonics
Please look at the video at the side of the webpage to help you pronounce the pure sounds (phonemes) that your child will be using.
Helpful documents
We encourage children to always form their letters and numbers accurately.
You can find the Knowledge Oragnisers for all of our topics in the downloads below.