Welcome to Foundation Stage 1

Welcome to our FS1 Class. In EYFS we plan for the children’s learning by closely observing their interests and level of development, then using these observations we plan activities to meet their needs and encourage them to meet their next steps in their development. We have an amazing indoor and outdoor space which allows us to cover all areas of the EYFS curriculum. We believe that children learn best through play and so play is at the centre of our curriculum. We use a combination of Adult Led and Child Led activities to encourage the children to explore, problem solve, develop their imagination and learn new skills.

We develop the children’s phonic skills by focusing on Phase 1 activities. These are designed to raise children’s awareness of the sounds and to develop their listening skills and build the skills needed before they are ready to move on to linking sounds to letters and then reading. The aspects of Phase 1 are:

• Aspect 1 – General sound discrimination – environmental
• Aspect 2 – General sound discrimination – instrumental sounds
• Aspect 3 – General sound discrimination – body percussion
• Aspect 4 – Rhythm and rhyme
• Aspect 5 – Alliteration
• Aspect 6 – Voice sounds
• Aspect 7 – Oral blending and segmenting

We love exploring our fantastic outdoor space, not only in our EYFS unit, but also the wider school grounds. Our lovely Spinney is a great place for a story and play while surrounded by beautiful nature. We also like visiting our school prayer garden where we have spent some time during our collective worship being in God’s presence.

We are getting ready for the summer holidays, and enjoying our last few weeks of the summer term in nursery. We have a few fun packed weeks ahead to help the children enjoy their time in FS1.

Our topic this half term has been ‘People who help us’ and we started by looking at all the jobs our family members do. Thank you so much for all the parents and family members who have sent in photos of them at work helping people the children have really enjoyed looking at them and learning about different jobs. We then moved on to looking at specific roles including firefighters, police officers, doctors nurses and finally dentists.

We have Healthy living week where we will be trying our some new sporting activities and learning about the importance of keeping healthy and fit and doing some cooking. We have also been trying out our fantastic balance bikes over the last few weeks, the children are getting good at using them!

We then have Arts Week where the children will be looking at a specific country and finding out about different crafts, art, music and culture and comparing it to our own.

In RE the children have been learning our school prayers and how to make the sign of the cross. Across the school year we have been learning about ‘Ourselves’, ‘Our Family’, ‘Baptism’ and ‘Birthdays’ where we celebrated Jesus’ birthday at Christmas. during the spring term we looked at ‘Celebrating’ and thinking about our Parish family. This term we have been learning about ‘Friends’ and how we are all friends of Jesus and we our final topic of the year is ‘our world’.   

A few reminders:

Please ensure your child has an appropriate coat every day, sunhat if its hot, with sun cream applied.

Please ensure that your child has a named water bottle each day.

Please make sure ALL uniform is named.

If you have any questions, please talk to a member of staff.

Kind Regards,  The FS1 team – Mrs Turp and Mrs Lewis