Early Years Foundation Stage 

The Early Years Foundation Stage is for children leading up to Reception age.  At Henley in Arden CofE Primary School, this is our Nursery and Reception children.   Our teaching and learning focuses on ensuring children develop in a safe environment that supports their wellbeing and social skills, as well as their growing independence. 

We operate Continuous Provision with high-quality resources for the age and stage of each year groups development, both in indoor and outdoor provision.  This supports the development of the Characteristics of Effective Learning: Playing and Exploring, Active Learning and Creating and Thinking Critically.

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) has seven areas of learning to support children’s development:

• Personal and Social Education
• Communication and Language
• Physical Development 
• Literacy
• Maths
• Understanding the World
• Expressive Arts and Design

Our provision has a real focus on basic skills: particularly in early reading and Maths. We also provide daily opportunities for fine and gross motor skill development through movement to music, dough disco and exciting mark making challenges. Reading and writing is taught through daily phonics sessions using the Squiggle scheme paired with Jolly Phonics actions to represent letter sounds. A weekly focus story or information book is used to plan our daily English sessions around in which we learn to form letters and words, use reading comprehension skills and apply our phonics knowledge in writing. We send home reading books for children to read at home and this is recorded in their reading diaries.

On Wednesday afternoons, the Reception and Nursery children come to school in warm clothes and bring waterproofs to go on our ‘Welly Wednesday’ in our onsite Forest Area. This provides a fantastic opportunity for children to explore many areas of the curriculum through nature, use real tools and build social skills through collaborative challenges.