Welcome to Class 1
Hello and welcome to all!
Class 1 is a small, mixed-age group of Reception and Year 1 children. We have a very enthusiastic and dedicated teaching team. Our Class Teacher is Miss Small and our Learning Support Assistant is Mrs Dauncey. We are fortunate to have a wonderful, spacious learning environment, consisting of a large classroom and two fantastic, adjoining outdoor areas. This free-flowing space, combined with our child-led learning ethos, enables us to carry out our learning and development through a playful, skills-based approach. We plan for skills development, and draw upon children’s own interests to increase the children's motivation- learning creatively and curiously through discovery.
In our classroom, we prioritise the development of a love of learning through discovery, and the celebration of individual strengths and needs through continual adaptation of our learning provision, teaching approaches and enabling environments. In Class 1, we foster a skills-based approach throughout, in order to focus on the development of 5 crucial skills: independence, collaboration, bravery (risk-taking), self-reflection and curiosity. Exercised using a combination of child-initiated and adult-led approaches, we aspire to build firm foundations with which children will thrive, viewing all learning as valuable and achievable, and all ‘mistakes’ as learning opportunities.
Class Teacher
Our Learning
We use a combination of the children's interests and key learning topics and themes (adhering to both the National Curriculum and EYFS Framework), to guide our learning experiences. Each day, we ensure that every child accesses their core learning subjects: phonics, literacy and mathematics. All broader curriculum subjects are accessed evenly across the week, ensuring a quality, balanced curriculum coverage. Learning is sometimes adult-led, through whole-class teaching or guided groups, or is accessed independently through continuous provision ('discovery time').
Phonics and Early Reading form the foundation of our Early Years and Year 1 curriculum, focussed upon through daily, group sessions which aim to rapidly enhance and progress children’s literary attainment. We follow the Read, Write, Inc. phonics programme, alongside a full Literacy programme (The Write Stuff), aiming to instil confident reading skills, alongside an ethos of reading for pleasure. We also vote for a class read daily, whereby children are immersed with a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry to increase interest and desire to read for themselves. We also introduce children to developing simple, yet vital, listening and speaking skills through the use of role-play, singing, 'book-talk', rhymes, pictures and games. Each week, your child will bring home a books that are accurately aligned with their current reading attainment. These books should be entirely decodable and practice application of recently taught sounds. We have Rainbow Reader awards each Friday, which will celebrate times read at home rather than completion of books, to maintain motivation and celebrate small successes and resilience.