Early Years Foundation Stage
Welcome to Cloverlea Early Years Foundation Stage!
Welcome to our Early Years Foundation Page.
Our Cloverlea Nursery and Reception classes are part of a happy, secure and caring school, which aims to provide the highest quality education and care. We are an inclusive setting where all the children and adults respect each other, and grow together in order to reach their full potential. Our children love to learn, and our dedicated staff provide an inspiring environment where all children learn through play.
Using nature based exploration our aims at Cloverlea are to develop communication, language, personal, social and emotional skills. We believe that attending a nature led EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) setting such as Cloverlea, can therefore greatly help children to develop their emotional intelligence; build resilience and learn how to take risks in a supportive environment, through activities such as den building, bug hunting, playing with sticks and learning about the value of protecting the environment.
For more information about our curriculum please click below:
EYFS Rationale and Long Term Plan
Phonics in EYFS
We use the Little Wandle programme in EYFS and KS1, the programme draws on the latest research into how children learn best; how to ensure learning stays in children’s long term memory and how best to enable children to apply their learning to become highly competent readers.
The children have daily sessions for Phonics in Reception alongside three reading sessions per week. The reading sessions focus on decoding (segmenting and blending), prosody (expression) and comprehension. We encourage you to continue to explore these areas at home when your child brings their reading book home.
Information sheet for sounds we focus on each term, as well as further information on the programme, can be found below:
Observation & Assessment in EYFS
At Cloverlea, our EYFS assessment is of two main types – on-going assessment, which is what our practitioners do on a daily basis to make decisions about what the child has learned or can do already so as to help the child move on in their learning – this is sometimes called ‘formative’ assessment because it informs the next steps that are planned with the child and the parent. These can often be recorded as an observation on itrack and is shared with our parents/carers. To help us further build a true picture of a child’s development, strengths and learning needs we encourage our parents and carers to share ‘Wow moments’ of their child’s ClassDojo profile.
Another type of assessment known as ‘summative’ assessment takes place within six weeks of a child joining EYFS and then each term thereafter, this is also recorded on our itrack system.
Once a child joins our Nursery & Reception setting and has been given time to settle and form relationships with our practitioners and peers we will use ‘WellComm’, which screens children for speech and language ability, often identifying problems before they become more serious, and provides activities to address them.