Welcome to our class page!

At Castle Primary, we believe that the Early Years Foundation Stage is crucial in securing solid foundations that children are going to continue to build upon. It is our intent that the children who enter our EYFS develop physically, verbally, cognitively and emotionally whilst embedding a positive attitude to school and learning. We believe that all children deserve to be valued as an individual and we are passionate in allowing all children to achieve their full, unique potential. With all of this in mind, we begin each new year by looking at the individual needs of our children and taking into account their different starting points- we then carefully develop our flexible EYFS Curriculum which enables them to follow the path of their learning journey, at a point, that is suitable for their unique needs and stage of development.
Children follow the EYFS curriculum, which has seven main areas of learning.

The Prime Areas:-

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development
• Communication and Language
• Physical Development

The Specific Areas:-

• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the World
• Expressive Arts and Design

The children in Year 1 will follow the National Curriculum.

Summer Term 2022

2 weeks after the caterpillars arrived we were finally ready to release our butterflies into the world. The children loved starting off the party with butterfly yoga before we opened the nets and waited very patiently for the butterflies to fly away. We ended the party with a butterfly hunt around the field to see if we could spot any of our butterflies enjoying the outdoors.

No longer hungry caterpillars!

We now have cocoons in both classrooms and hopefully in 2 weeks we will have butterflies. 

The children had a wonderful time on our trip to the canal. We found so many different minibeasts in the 3 different ponds we explored. We all went on a walk up the canal to look for minibeasts that live around the canal and even had time for a play in the park! 

Welcome back! We hope you have all had a relaxing Easter break and you are all ready for our new Mini-beast topic. We have lots of exciting learning planned and will begin our topic looking for our friend Superworm! 

This term we will be spending lots of time outside so please ensure you children are well equipped for rain and sunshine. Please ensure your child has a water bottle and a waterproof coat in school everyday and that on sunny days they have sun-cream applied before school and come to school with a sun hat. As part of our learning, we will be spending lots of our time exploring the natural world which means we will be out and about exploring the school grounds as much as we can. 

We look forward to sharing our learning with you and will upload regular photos on here for you to enjoy. 

Our Summer Topic Overview can be found above our Summer Term section on our class page, please have a look as this will tell you more about our plans for this term, including our first trip out of school! More details to follow soon.

As always, if you have any questions please ask or send us an email to our class email address and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Best wishes

The EYFS Team 

Spring Term 2021

Welcome back!

We hope you have all had a relaxing break and that the children are ready to start our new topic 'once Upon a Time'.

On Monday the children arrived at school to discover a crime scene in our classroom. Someone had been in our room over the holidays and made a bit of a mess! The children have spent this week using their investigation skills to look for clues and find out what had happened. 

Our text for the next 2 weeks is 'The Three Little Pigs. In science we carried out an investigation to see which materials would be the best to use as a roof for a new pigs house- we soon realised that paper was not a good idea... 

Welcome back! We hope you have all had an enjoyable break and that everyone is excited to be back at school. Please see the Spring Term topic overview which has been sent to you all and is saved at the top of our class page. This will give you an insight into what we will be learning about this term.

We are excited to be having a visit from a pirate this term who is going to be teaching us all about recycling and how we can help to save our plant from too much waste. Watch out for the photos...

We look forward to working with you this term. Please come and see us if you have any questions about our learning this term.

Many thanks

The EYFS Team 

Autumn Term 2021

Merry Christmas

The children have worked extremely hard this term becoming designers, makers, explorers and independent learners. We have been on lots of adventures during out transport topic- off around the world in our 'hundred decker bus' and finding out why it is not a good idea to take an elephant on a bus! 

We have now completed Phase 2 phonics and have started over the last 2 weeks to learn the Phase 3 sounds too. The children are becoming much more confident with recognising these sounds at speed and using their taught sounds to blend and read words. The children in Year 1 have now also started to learn their Phase 5 sounds in order to extend their phonic knowledge and to become independent writers. 

In maths the children have been consolidating their knowledge and understanding of facts within 5- subitising, counting, ordering and number bonds. Our next unit, Alive in 5! will start to look at the part whole model and using a 5 frame to support understanding. 

We hope all our families have a very merry Christmas and that you enjoy a well deserved break.

Thank you for all of the support you have given us in 2021 and we look forward to welcoming you all back in 2022!

We have had so much fun this week getting ready to celebrate Benjamin bear's birthday! The children have written a list of ingredients needed to bake a cake, baked their own cake, decorated it and of course eaten it...

We spent our Thursday getting ready to party by decorating the classroom, making hats and bringing our own bears in to help us celebrate. We hope you enjoy sharing these pictures with your children. 

We have almost made it through our first week and have been so proud of how well the children have settled in. They have shown great independence and have enjoyed exploring their new classrooms!

We hope you have all received bookbags now, the children need to bring these to school each day please. In the bag the children will have their homework book, inside the front cover is an explanation of what we would like the children to do. Homework books will be collected in on a Wednesday and sent home again on a Friday.

The children also now have a Home Communication Book in the bookbag too. Reading books have been sent home with the Year 1 children and the EYFS children will receive 1 when we feel they are confidently using their sounds to blend some simple CVC words. The EYFS children will bring home a list of sounds and words taught at school each week on a Friday for you to practise at home until they get a reading book.

Please ensure your child has a coat and wellies in school every day, we use our outside areas as an additional classroom, so your child will be outside lots throughout the day.

Thank you for the support you have given us this week and your patience whilst we get to know you all. If you would like to pass on a message to us or you have any questions, please email us and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Mrs Ballard- eyfs-y1-ab-nm@the-castle-primary.devon.sch.uk

Miss Poole- eyfs-ap@the-castle-primary.devon.sch.uk

Many thanks

The EYFS Team