Our Class Teacher is Mrs Edney.  She is really passionate about Early Maths, loves all sorts of Music and spending time with her friends, family and pets. She loves to sing and play the piano too, much to the embarrassment of her teenaged son! 

Miss Wells enjoys reading, crafting and adventures with her family.  

Mrs Yeandle loves travel and spending time with her family and her dog.

We visit the school library every week where children can choose up to 2 books to take out on loan.

PE takes place weekly, and children are encouraged to leave PE kits at school.

Please take a look at our Early Years Brochure by clicking the link 

Our Curriculum

Our EYFS curriculum is designed to give children the best possible start, building strong foundations through play, stories, relationships and rich experiences. We recognise that young children learn best when learning is meaningful, engaging and rooted in their interests.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED)

We use Jigsaw to support children’s personal, social and emotional development. Through stories, discussions and age‑appropriate activities, children learn to understand their feelings, manage emotions, build positive relationships and develop confidence and independence.

Physical Development

PE is supported through Get Set for PE, ensuring children develop fundamental movement skills such as balance, coordination and control. Opportunities for both indoor and outdoor physical activity are provided daily to build strength, confidence and enjoyment of movement. Children also participate in many different activities

A Story‑Based Curriculum

Stories sit at the heart of our curriculum. We use a story‑based approach across many areas of learning to support language development, imagination, expressive arts and understanding of the world.

Our approach is informed by Greg Bottrill’s Drawing Club, encouraging children to talk about stories, learn new vocabulary, draw, mark‑make and share their ideas. This supports early writing skills and promotes creativity and deep engagement with texts. We also use the CUSP Literature Spine to ensure children are exposed to a wide range of high‑quality texts, including traditional tales, modern stories and non‑fiction.

Phonics in Hazel Class

We have chosen to teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. 

Daily phonics lessons in Reception

• We start with daily 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, and build up to a longer lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
• Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
• We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress:
• Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 sounds and graphemes, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.

Daily Keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read

• Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, to help every child secure their learning.

Teaching reading: Reading practice sessions three times a week

• We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week.
• These are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children. 
• We use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments and book matching grids.
• Sessions are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis.
• Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory.
• The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
  • decoding
  • prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
  • comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.
• In Reception these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding focus initially on wordless books and will have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read decodable books.

Phonics at home and reading

• All children have their own Phonics workbook, which they can share with their families.  Each taught sound is included, along with hints on articulation, a formation phrase and a picture.  We encourage families to help their child think of words starting with or containing newly learned sounds and share different ways of practising and learning the formation of each grapheme. 
• Families are provided with a log in to access their child’s reading  book to ensure success is shared with the family.
• Library books also go home for parents to share and read with/to children.
• We use the Little Wandle parents’ resources to engage our families and share information about phonics, the benefits of sharing books, how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops.

Maths in Hazel Class

We follow Ark Curriculum+ for teaching Maths. This approach has been shown, by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), to give pupils on average two months’ additional progress after one year on the programme – read the EEF report. We teach for Mastery in Maths and allow our pupils to gain a deep understanding in order to make continual progress and move onto more complex concepts.  Maths is a subject that everyone can and should be able to perform confidently and competently.  We choose to teach by breaking down Maths objectives into the smallest steps, so that every pupil is secure in every new concept before moving on. 

Early Learning Goals for Maths

There are two Early Learning Goals for maths.  This is what children at the expected level of development will be able to do/have at the end of their Reception Year.

ELG: Number

Have a deep understanding of number to 10, including the composition of each number

• Subitise (recognise quantities without counting) up to 5
• Automatically recall (without reference to rhymes, counting or other aids) number bonds up to 5 (including subtraction facts) and some number bonds to 10, including double facts.

ELG: Numerical Patterns

• Verbally count beyond 20 (not simply reciting), recognising the pattern of the counting system
• Compare quantities up to 10 in different contexts, recognising when one quantity is greater than, less than or the same as the other quantity
• Explore and represent patterns within numbers up to 10, including evens and odds, double facts and how quantities can be distributed equally.