Foundation Stage - September 2024

Ready for Reception - September 2024

As the applications for September 2024 have now closed, parents and carers will have been notified if their child has been offered a place at Holy Cross for September 2024.

Please take a look at the following information regarding Reception at Holy Cross. Here you will find;

Pictures of our WONDERFUL learning environment
How we teach phonics, maths and writing
Policies

Please note this webpage will be updated with documentation throughout the Summer 2024 Term, in preparation for Autumn 2024.

World Book Day 2024

At Holy Cross we aim to support all children to become independent and collaborative learners. We provide a broad and balanced curriculum to inspire children through an imaginative and immersive approach, ensuring that the children are happy and enthusiastic to learn. We foster and nurture the children’s interests and curiosities by giving them a strong foundation for their future learning. Our school Mission Statement plays an important part in our hope and expectations for the children in the Foundation Stage.

'I want to be the very best I can be so I can do what God wants me to do.

I want to be the very best I can be so God can do His work through me'.

Religious Education

Religious Education is at the heart of our curriculum. At Holy Cross we enable our children to acquire an excellent Religious Education through a well taught and well resourced RE curriculum aligned to the Religious Education Directory (RED). As a Catholic school we promote the Gospel virtues and values. We welcome and value everyone in our school, celebrating and valuing our differences, our uniqueness and that we are all equally loved by God.

Writing letters in RE

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Writing notes and messages to God

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Our Prayer Chair

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Our Wonderful Gospel Guardians

Take a look at our class environment

Our Classroom Environment

We love to learn both inside and outside in our lovely garden.

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Parent Partnership

We place a high value on establishing close links between home and school so that we can work effectively together enabling each child to achieve their full potential. We have an open door policy and offer lots of opportunities throughout the year for parents to come into school and attend workshops for phonics, reading and maths.

Read Write Inc.

At Holy Cross we aim for all our children to become fluent, confident readers who are passionate about reading.

Children who read regularly or are read to regularly have the opportunity to open the doors to so many different worlds!

More importantly, reading will give your child the tools to become independent life-long learners.

We can achieve this together through:

Read Write Inc, a program to help to your child read at school
Encouraging children to develop a love of books by reading to them daily, at home and at school
Giving children access to a wide range of books at school and at home

What is Read Write Inc?

Read Write Inc (RWI) is a phonics complete literacy programme which helps all children learn to read fluently and at speed so they can focus on developing their skills in comprehension, vocabulary and spelling. Our RWI Lead, Miss Heaton will be able to support you in understanding how the RWI program works when your child starts in September.

RWI was developed by Ruth Miskin and more information on this can be found on the link below:

RWI for Parents

We had a fantastic visit from the police for careers week. The children loved exploring the car and we even had a chat with the police officers on the radio!

We then explored lots of different careers back in class and had fun role playing different jobs.

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We recently class trip to Dartmoor Zoo. We saw so many animals and had a workshop to learn more about Minibeasts.

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Our Learning Environment over time

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Talk for Writing

Our core English teaching and learning follows the Talk for Writing approach within which pupils in EYFS:

1) Learn a set text – oral rehearsal

2) Adapt the learnt text – text mapping

3) Talk and write a version of the text type – big write

Here are some examples of our story maps over time.

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Power Maths

Here at Holy Cross, we use Power Maths as our core maths programme. This is an exciting class mastery approach, which has been recommended by the DfE, that works for every child. It is based upon the concrete, pictorial and abstract approach.

Every lesson is divided into sections that involve plenty of discovery, sharing, collaboration, practice and reflection. Children are encouraged to solve problems each day through the use of concrete resources, pictorial representations and abstract thinking.

At the heart of this programme is the idea that all children can achieve and be successful mathematicians with the right growth mindset.