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 the Autumn Term we learn all about different colours, Ourselves and Our Families, People in our Community, Autumn, Diwali and Christmas. In the Spring Term we learn about Winter, Ocean Animals, Pirates at Sea, Chinese New Year, Easter, Spring and Traditional Tales. In the Summer Term we learn about different kinds of Transport, Jungle and Zoo animals, Eid, Ramadan and Summer. Your child will learn through play in Continuous Provision and adult led activities including daily phonics, daily maths and language groups. We also have weekly access to Purple Mash for ICT, PE is in the School Hall or down on the Astro Turf and our RE sessions follow the same themes as the rest of the school.
We have an extensive outdoor area which is reflective of the 7 Areas of the EYFS. The children love to explore our climbing frame and slide, the climbing wall, cars and bikes. It will look like the children are 'just playing' but each activity is planned for them all to make their next steps in learning - that's what we do best at St Oswald's; we learn through play and have lots of fun along the way! We also have regular access to the Mud Kitchen and our own Forest School. We learn all about nature, growing, spotting changes and taking care of our beauitful world!
The children are encouraged to play out in all weathers so please send in wellies and a coat with a hood and sleeves, we provide the waterproofs.
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. |