What we Learn in Nursery
All about Nursery
The first stage of your child's journey at St Oswald's is Nursery, which they will attend from the age of three. They begin their learning journey with us via different topics: in Autumn Term we learn about Ourselves, Autumn, Animals, and Christmas; in Spring Term we learn about People Who Help Us, Winter, Space and Spring; in Summer Term we learn about Easter, Julia Donaldson stories, Growth and Change and Summer. Your child will learn through play in Continuous Provision and adult led activities throughout their session. Nursery has two sessions which run from 8.55am - 11.55pm and 12pm - 3pm.
We have an extensive outdoor area which caters to the children's gross and fine motor development via the climbing frame and slide, the climbing wall, the sand pit, bikes and trikes, the mud kitchen and a variety of construction, role play and mark making areas. The seven areas of learning in the EYFS are covered by both indoor and outdoor activties and there is free flow between these two areas. The children are encouraged to play out in all weathers and are provided with appropriate clothing such as waterproofs and wellies. Please feel free to provide your child with their own if you wish.
Your child will have a wonderful start to their educational journey here at St Oswald's.
Early reading and phonics
The phonics reading scheme we use in school is Red Rose Phonics. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
Phase One (Nursery/Reception) | Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
| Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segent longer words with adjacet consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
| Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) | Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
| Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |