Our Early Years Curriculum 

At Bushey & Oxhey Infant School, we recognise that every child begins Reception with their own unique experiences, interests, strengths and starting points. Children join us from a range of nurseries, early years settings and childminders, and we prioritise building strong relationships with children and families to ensure a smooth and successful transition into school.

Our ambitious EYFS curriculum is designed to give every child the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to thrive throughout their school journey. Through careful assessment of children’s starting points, we identify individual needs and provide the right support and challenge to enable all children to make excellent progress.

Intent

Our EYFS curriculum aims to inspire children to become confident, curious and independent learners. We provide a safe, nurturing and inclusive environment where children feel valued, develop positive relationships and are encouraged to take risks, explore and learn through meaningful experiences. Through our carefully planned curriculum, children develop a strong foundation in communication and language, early reading, writing, mathematics and personal development. We place particular emphasis on supporting children’s emotional wellbeing, self-regulation and vocabulary development, ensuring they are well prepared for the next stage of their education.

Our children benefit from strong links with our local community, enriching experiences, educational visits, sporting opportunities and close links with Bushey Manor Junior School. We aim for every child to leave Reception as a confident learner who is ready for Key Stage One and equipped with the skills and attitudes needed for future success.

By the end of Reception, we want our children to be:

• Confident learners who are willing to explore, persevere and take risks.
• Positive about learning and able to manage their emotions and behaviour.
• Effective communicators who can express their ideas, thoughts and feelings.
• Able to build positive relationships and collaborate with others.
• Independent learners who are ready for the challenges of Key Stage One and beyond.
•  

Implementation

Our EYFS curriculum is rooted in the Early Years Foundation Stage framework and is delivered through a balance of purposeful play, high-quality adult interactions and carefully planned learning experiences.

Children develop across the seven areas of learning:

• Communication and Language
• Personal, Social and Emotional Development
• Physical Development
• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the World
• Expressive Arts and Design

The Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning are at the heart of our approach:

• Playing and Exploring
• Active Learning
• Creating and Thinking Critically

Our curriculum is carefully sequenced to ensure children develop key knowledge and skills progressively. Each term, children are immersed in meaningful lines of enquiry, supported by high-quality texts, engaging hooks and memorable experiences. These opportunities encourage children to ask questions, investigate, make connections and develop a deeper understanding of the world around them. Alongside our planned curriculum, staff respond skilfully to children’s interests, ideas and emerging needs. Through expert observation, assessment and interaction, adults identify opportunities to extend learning, develop vocabulary and challenge children’s thinking.

Our enabling indoor and outdoor environments are carefully designed to promote independence, creativity and exploration. Children are encouraged to make choices, solve problems and apply their learning through rich experiences and purposeful play. Through skilled questioning, modelling and interactions, our experienced practitioners support children to develop confidence, resilience and a lifelong love of learning.

Impact

The impact of our EYFS curriculum is seen through children who are confident, independent and enthusiastic learners. Through our carefully planned provision and responsive teaching, children make strong progress from their individual starting points and develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for future success. By the end of Reception, children are able to communicate effectively, develop positive relationships, demonstrate independence and approach new challenges with confidence and resilience. They have developed a secure foundation in early reading, writing, mathematics and wider curriculum knowledge, preparing them successfully for the transition into Key Stage One.

Our ongoing assessment enables us to understand each child’s progress, celebrate their achievements and identify where further support or challenge is needed. Children develop the confidence to ask questions, solve problems, explore ideas and take ownership of their learning.Through our inclusive and nurturing approach, children leave Reception feeling valued, capable and ready to embrace the next stage of their education as curious, motivated and successful learners.

Phonics In Reception

The school uses 'The Little Wandle Letters and Sounds' revised progression approach to the teaching of Phonics. 

In both of our Federation Schools, and in our Reception classes, Reading is at the heart of everything we do. Our English and Reading curriculum has a vast selection of rich and inspirational stories at its heart; we ensure that our children have lots of opportunities to read in lots of different contexts. We believe that being a fluent and avid reader opens doors for children to the wider world and gives them the tools they need to be lifelong learners, supporting us in our mission of 'Educating Today's Child For Tomorrow'. 

We believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We briefly review the foundations for phonics that children have largely covered with their Nursery and pre-school providers at the start of the Autumn Term.  In Reception, we follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression. The progression ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through our Federation schools.

Every teacher and teaching assistant in our school has been trained to teach reading, so we have the same expectations of progress and a consistent approach across the school. We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.

Phonics enables your child to learn to read quickly by teaching sounds and tricky words in a systematic order. This means that children are able to start reading words and sentences quickly – even as soon as learning their first four sounds!  Children learn that sounds can be represented by graphemes (letters) and to blend sounds together to read words.

Throughout the year, your child's class teacher will be running informative workshops to keep you up to date on your child's progress and to inform you on how you can best support your child with their reading at home.  The Little Wandle website has some useful videos for parents, which you can find on the link at the bottom of this page.  

Home Reading

Reception and Year 1 children will take fully decodable Big Cats reading books home to further practise the skills learnt at school. These books are matched to each child’s phonics ability and are chosen by their teachers to ensure that children are reading books of an appropriate level.  They may take books home more than once, and the focus for these phonics books is immersion and understanding of the application of their phonic skills, whilst building confidence and fluency. 

In addition each child visits the school library every week to select a book of their choice to share at home. This book will probably not be fully decodable for your child so the expectation is not for the child to read this book themselves. We believe strongly that children will develop a love of reading through experiencing success when reading at home and having quality story time with a wide range of books.

The best way to help your child achieve well in reading, and indeed across the curriculum, is to READ TO THEM.  Re-read old favourite books. Listen to audio books together. Talk about characters, what happened in the story, what might happen next. Read a few lines and then get your child to re-read/copy what you have read - model intonation, character voices and use of punctuation.  Try to never let 'hearing your child read' become a mundane or routine chore - your child will pick up on that.   Families who manage this well, set a routine time each evening and make it as long or as short as the mood dictates. 

Listen to your read and share and discuss a variety of reading materials as often as you can. Throughout school, high quality books and other reading resources in the classrooms, along with special events such as author visits, help to inspire and motivate children to read.  Parents are encouraged to hear their child read every day, or as often as possible and return their reading bag to school on the prescribed days. 

At the end of Year 1, all our children take a national test in phonics. We support our children to do well in this. By Year 2 outcomes for all our children in reading are consistently above the national average in all benchmarks.

Children read in as many situations as possible, not just in reading lessons. Reading takes place in all lessons, using books, subtitles, environmental print, display boards and electronic devices (to name but a few).