Rochford Primary & Nursery School

Sunshine Nursery

We have a wonderfully caring team of practitioners who are experienced and trained to nurture, care for and inspire every child in their care therefore providing the best start and education for your little ones.

Primary School Newsletters

Parents Guide to Phonics Shed 

Sunshine Nursery Summer Term Letter

Statutory framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage

Early Learning Goals Detailed Steps click here

Seeing children develop through fun and play based learning at Rochford Primary and Nursery School is a wonderful thing. We have designed our fresh and homely nursery to ensure each child can experience inspiring educational activities indoors and outdoors in all weather while getting that home from home experience. Our learning environment is designed to mirror the learning opportunities offered to our neighbouring reception class. We share our outdoor space with the reception children so that they can learn alongside each other to support each others development. Our outdoor learning environment provides children with exciting opportunities to explore, have fun and learn in a safe and secure environment. From water play to mud kitchens and a beach hut full of sand we offer the opportunity for your children to be inspired and as a result learn and develop on a daily basis.

Outdoor learning

We believe outdoor play and exploration are an essential part of learning and growing up. So we have developed our outdoor learning environment to provide children with the greatest variety of experiences, challenges and controlled risks.

The equipment and activities in our gardens nurture healthy and active fun through building, den making, imaginative role play areas, mud kitchen, sand and water play.

In our outdoor learning environment children can learn and interact with natural elements; they can be engineers using the drainpipes managing the flow of water. They can be a chef in the mud kitchen whilst developing early writing skills. Take a risk in the building site by creating their very own constructions. Build a den in the den area and cook a meal on the fireplace.

EYFS curriculum

Link to development matters:

Development Matters - Non-statutory curriculum guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage

Children are born ready, able and eager to learn. They actively reach out to interact with other people, and in the world around them. Development is not an automatic process, however. It depends on each unique child having opportunities to interact in positive relationships and enabling environments.

Phonics Shed

In our school we use Phonics Shed, a Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme. The scheme enables children to become fluent readers and writers by providing strategies to decode words by teaching links between letters and the sounds they can make; this is called Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence (GPC). Phonics Shed uses the blending and segmenting approach to teach children to decode words. Children are taught to blend sounds together to make words by using the ‘Sound it, Squash it, Say it’ technique. Then to segment words into sounds they are taught to ‘Say it, Stretch it, Sound it’. The scheme is designed to run from the Early Years Foundation Stage to Year 2; but can extend into Key Stage 2 for those children who need further support in phonics.

Phonics Shed connects with the existing Spelling Shed scheme to ensure all curriculum objectives are met, while preparing the children for their Phonics Screening Check assessment using fast-paced progression through all common GPCs. Children will be taught to read and spell a wide variety of words in a short space of time. The initial stages of the programme not only introduce decodable CVC words but encourage children to attempt to blend and segment longer words. This is supported by a range of High Frequency Words (HFWs), including some partially decodable words, which are linked to specific GPCs. These HFWs give children access to a wider range of texts as they account for up to 50% of school-based texts.

As the children work through the scheme, they also gain access to decodable alien words. The Phonics Shed alien words match the criteria given for those used in the Phonics Screening Check assessment resources. Talk 4 Writing Talk 4 Writing is a powerful tool to teach the rudiments of writing as it enables children to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally before reading and analysing it and then writing their own version.

In Nursery we focus on Chapter 1.