English
In the Pre-Prep, we place great emphasis on every child’s literacy learning and development, recognising that these skills are essential to allow progress across our wider curriculum and support enjoyment of learning.
Our aim is to nurture a love for both reading and writing. Our strong literacy programme focuses on ensuring that our phonics teaching provides children with the necessary skills required to decode language, allowing them to build words using the sounds they have learnt. Through small group work, a varied reading scheme and differentiated programmes of learning, each child learns at the pace appropriate to their ability. Although we actively encourage independent learning, our reading scheme continues throughout the whole school, until we are sure that the necessary skills are firmly in place for a child to continue their learning successfully.
The phonics scheme that we use is Read Write Inc. This teaches children the sounds in English, the letters that represent them, and how to form the letters when writing. Since introducing Read Write Inc. in 2022 we have seen the benefits including increased confidence across ability, rapid progress and improved comprehension skills.
Maths
From Reception, we seek to give our children a firm foundation of basic numeracy skills and strategies. We cover a wide range of topics including: number recognition and formation, basic operations, times tables, problem solving, shape, data and measure. The work is differentiated to ensure that support or extension work is available as appropriate. We believe that it is key to success in mathematics to depth of understanding in basic concepts to ensure good confidence and continual progress.
Science
Children have science lessons as a part of their curriculum from Reception. By developing a basic understanding and knowledge of the world around us, including activities in our woodland and trips to local beaches, our children learn to investigate and question how things work. Year groups focus on a particular theme each half term. Topics include: animals, materials, seasons, light, plants, electricity, habitats and investigations. We adopt a 'hands-on' approach to encourage interest in experimentation preparing our children for science lessons in our dedicated lab from Year 3.