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Amherst Primary School

Every child, every chance, every day.

Home Page

Amherst Primary School

Every child, every chance, every day.

Early Years

Reception at Amherst

The Reception team support and nurture the children during their transition to Amherst Primary school and throughout their time with us.  We believe that children need to feel content, secure, and valued; and that this should be done through developing positive relationships, so that they can flourish and be ready to learn.  Our aim is to develop confident children who begin to develop a love of learning at the start of their journey at Amherst Primary school.  We focus on ensuring the children have the best possible start, and gain the foundational skills and knowledge they need, to achieve whilst at Amherst Primary school and beyond.

 

There are three classes and a large shared outdoor learning environment.  We recognise the importance of a calm, purposeful and orderly environment to enable and support children’s play and development.  Therefore, our classrooms include many natural resources and displays have hessian backgrounds. Within the environment, open-ended resources are accessible to the children so that they are able to choose and develop activities independently. 

 

We understand that high quality interactions with adults positively impacts children’s learning and progress in all areas of learning.  Therefore, we place importance on adults being in the environment with the children and interacting with them, following their lead, and supporting and developing their skills, knowledge and characteristics of effective learning.

 

A Unique Child

We recognise that every child is a unique individual who is constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident, and self-assured.  We also acknowledge that all children are unique and develop at varying rates.   At Amherst Primary School, we place emphasis on meeting the needs of the individual child and supporting them at their own pace.  Our school values are used to promote children to develop their characteristics of effective learning and develop positive attitudes towards learning.  This is done through praise and encouragement, celebration certificates and house points.

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
The EYFS is made up of seven areas of learning:

Prime areas:

  • Personal, social, emotional development
  • Physical Development
  • Communication and Language

Specific areas:

  • Literacy
  • Maths
  • Understanding the World
  • Expressive Arts and Design

 

Characteristics of Effective Learning

The characteristics of effective learning reflect and underpin the different ways that children learn.  Our Amherst values also support and strengthen the characteristics of effective learning, in particular, resilience, confidence, and open-mindedness.  The characteristics run throughout all seven areas of learning and development.  They represent processes, rather than outcomes, and support the children to become effective and motivated learners. 

 

Playing and exploring – engagement

 

Active learning – motivation

 

Creating and thinking critically – thinking

 

  • Finding out and exploring
  • Playing with what they know 
  • Being willing to ‘have a go’
  • Being involved and concentrating
  • Keeping trying 
  • Enjoying achieving what they set out to do
  • Having their own ideas
  • Making links
  • Choosing ways to do things

 

Curriculum
Our curriculum encompasses all seven areas of learning.  All areas of learning are important, interconnected and underpin each other.  There is a particular emphasis placed on the three prime areas of learning during the start of the children’s journey at Amherst Primary School, as these are particularly important for building a foundation for learning, so that children can thrive.

We aim to deliver a curriculum which meets the needs of the whole child.  Areas of learning are taught through themes with strong links to the English texts we cover.  The teachers in Reception plan an overview of each term showing when special events are taking place, and our weekly plans include enhancements, activities and lessons linked to the skills and knowledge being taught.  We try to ensure that there is a balance between adult-led and child-initiated learning, and we place importance on learning through play where children can practice and imbed their skills and knowledge as well as developing their curiosity and sense of wonder.

Phonics

At Amherst Primary, we follow the Sounds Write phonics scheme.  Children in Reception have daily phonics inputs, and when they are ready, have opportunities to read phonetic books at school and home, from the Phonic Books Dandelion series, which follows the Sounds Write progression.
 

Some useful documents 

Phonics in Reception

Home reading pack guide

47 Sounds Write Leaflet
 

Mathematics

Our Maths planning follows the White Rose Maths scheme.  Our Maths lessons follow small steps which provide a variety of opportunities to develop children’s understanding of number, shape, measure, and spatial thinking.


English

We use texts from Literacy Tree in our twice weekly English lessons.  Alongside the texts used in English lessons, we have developed our own reading spine.  The reading spine has been created to ensure that children have access to a range of quality texts.  These are used to promote reading for pleasure and to expose the children to rich language and vocabulary. 

 

The books that we read in Reception

Reception Reading Spine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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