What learning looks like in Robins:

Play and exploration is fundamental within our Early Years curriculum. This means children are able to choose activities where they can engage with other children or adults or, sometimes, play alone. During these activities, the children will learn by first-hand experiences; by actively ‘doing’ as well as through scaffolding and modelling by adults.

Planning

There will be a good variety of planned and prepared activities by the teachers, as well as allowing time for the children to initiate their own learning both in Reception and Y1. Many of the EYFS activities will be planned through discussion with the children around their current interests, as well as considering their learning styles and stages of development.

As the children progress through Reception, the academic learning activities increase. Each child continues to be supported and challenged through a well-balanced curriculum, which caters for each child’s individual needs and abilities.

Teaching

During our morning sessions, the children in Reception and Year 1 are taught separately in two smaller groups and we are lucky enough to have completely separate learning areas, within our classroom, to be able to do this. All learning is planned by our class teachers and then taught by either the teacher or our highly experienced teaching assistant, Mrs Clapton. We alternate groups every week so that all children are regularly taught by the class teacher. In this way, we are able to provide more personalised learning opportunities for our children in line with either the EYSF or National Curriculum and cater for all individual needs.

In Reception, we have structured phonics and maths sessions every morning. We currently use the Twinkl Phonics programme to begin our children’s reading journey and they are always so passionate to learn. Throughout their time in Reception they are taught Phase 2, 3 and 4, with phase 1 having been explored during their time in our Pre-school, Ladybirds. Later in the year we introduce Drawing Club, which is an exciting way to help transition our children through from mark making to forming letters, words and eventually sentences. The individual progress they make astounds us every time and they ALWAYS have so much fun in Drawing Club! For our maths sessions we follow the Can Do maths scheme where the children engage in lots of practical adult led activities as well as learning through exploration and self led problem-solving.

Likewise, as children transition from Reception to Year 1, we continue to follow the same schemes to keep learning consistent. Our Year 1 children are taught phase 5 of Twinkl Phonics which focusses on alternative pronunciations of graphemes taught in Reception and Can Do Maths which covers the Y1 national Curriculum objectives. 

Learning

Through carefully thought out planning and a high standard of teaching, the learning in Robins takes care of itself. In our safe and happy environment, that promotes high behaviour expectations, the children are always so wonderful, so keen and want to learn and engage themselves in learning activities. That being said, there are always those ‘in the moment’ opportunities to for our adults to enhance learning but that can only happen though all of our staff really knowing our individual children, and knowing ‘where are they now and where do they need to go next?