Foundation Stage 2

Welcome to our Foundation Stage

OFSTED say: 

'Everyone is valued here. Relationships between staff and pupils are warm and positive.'

'Developing pupils’ language and communication skills is a priority in this school. Staff focus on talk with children in Nursery and Reception classes. They effectively model speaking and listening skills to children. They link exciting learning opportunities to stories and rhymes. Children are encouraged to talk about their learning.'

We value and respect learning through play, combining a child-led approach through enhanced continuous provision, with direct, bespoke small group teaching and adult intervention at the point of learning. Curiosity is engendered through relationships, interests, surprise and the natural world. We learn inside and outdoors each day, utilising our open spaces well. 

By using the 'Early Years Foundation Stage Statutory Framework' and 'Development Matters' we ensure breadth of coverage and learning in line with developmental ages and stages of the children.

We develop our children’s cultural capital through a range of themes that spark interest, incorporating children’s passions and fascinations. 

We create close partnerships with all our families to provide the foundations children need to make the most of their abilities and talents as they grow up and we do this in partnership with home. Our families join us for weekly Stay and Play sessions, Early Reading projects and Family Art groups with our Artist in Residence.  Opportunities to volunteer in our Foundation Stage are plentiful and we value the teamwork that is palpable here. Tapestry is used to communicate a child's success.

Red Robin House also offers our parents a wealth of skills and opportunities and more information can be found in the 'Supporting our Families in Foundation Stage' tab.

We love reading! Our children make quick and confident progress in reading. We immerse our children in high quality texts - we are a Power of Reading school. We share wonderful picture books. We learn to read through systematic synthetic phonics from FS2 and children embed their knowledge of phonemes and graphemes, segmenting and blending and then applying their knowledge to read phonetically decodable texts, taking books, cartoons, comics and captions home to practice. 

We chat ... and dream up stories!  A key component of our Foundation Stage curriculum is developing children’s oracy; their vocabulary, sentence structure and confidence to speak about their thoughts and ideas. We know that developing pupils’ confidence, resilience and knowledge is highly important so that they can keep themselves mentally healthy.

In our Foundation Stage colleagues use the Helicopter Stories approach to promoting Oracy and allowing children to develop the confidence to express their own ideas. We call our version of this “Story Dreaming”. During a Story Dreaming session, children dictate their stories to an adult scribe. Later that same day, a group of children gather around a stage and the stories are acted out. We have found this to be a powerful tool in encouraging children to speak in front of others, think imaginatively and begin to develop skills to organise their thoughts and ideas, as well as the legitimacy of hearing a story and tweaking it to make it their own.

We sing songs and play with rhymes throughout the day to train the children to hear sounds and patterns. We teach children to learn them off by heart and sing to one another. We visit theatres and welcome visitors who sing and play instruments to us. Rhymes are fantastic vocabulary boosters. They often feature a pleasing rhythmic pattern and simple repetitive phrases that babies and young children find easy to remember and repeat. In order to develop their phonological awareness, children need to be repeatedly exposed to spoken language and nursery rhymes provide the perfect way to do this. All children learn 16 key rhymes during Foundation Stage so that they have a repertoire of known ryhmes.

We master mathematics in Early Years.  Young children are naturally curious, noticing differences in quantity and the shape of objects, and use early mathematical concepts when they play. We know mathematical understanding helps children make sense of the world around them, interpret situations, and solve problems in everyday life, whether that’s understanding time, sharing amounts with their peers, or counting in play. 

'The young child approaching a new problem is like the scientist operating at the edge of his chosen field' Jerome Bruner 

Samples of a FS2 weekly timetable along with teaching and learning plans can be found below.