Welcome to Pre-Prep

This emphasis on life skills begins as young as Nursery and in each year group we build on these foundations so that very early on the children feel secure enough in their own environment to take risks and feel comfortable enough with routines to act responsibly and to take care of each other. We recognise that the children need to be supported in both their physical, educational and mental wellbeing to be confident in their actions and decisions, whether they are three or thirteen years old.

We offer a holistic, inspiring education which creates confident, independent learners with the skills to succeed throughout life and we do all this whilst making friends and having fun. In Early Years we give the children opportunities to learn through free play and investigation.

The curriculum is highly practical, making use of both the indoor and outdoor classrooms and outdoor areas. Songs and physical activities, practical maths, science investigations, iPads, computers and expressive artwork are all used to give the children the tools for learning. We develop the fine motor skills used in handwriting and small tool manipulation through construction and outdoor learning.

Children learn how to read through games and a secure phonics programme and how to write using the cursive script that allows us to put our imaginative ideas onto paper. In addition, children have lessons in French, Music and PE and every day they take the opportunity to go outside, either in their allocated outside area or to explore our wonderful grounds through Woodland Learning.

The children benefit from specialist teachers for PE, Swimming, Music, Forest School and French.

We have excellent relationships with our Nursery and Reception families and communicate daily in person with parents as well as sharing progress on our Tapestry platform.

In Years 1 and 2 the learning is divided into subjects; literacy, maths and French lessons are primarily classroom-based whist lessons in science, art, RE, music, computing, PE and Topic flexibly incorporate both the outdoor and indoor classrooms. We organise our timetable to ensure that the core subjects of literacy and maths are taught in the mornings, when the children are fresh and eager to learn, and that the afternoons are given to the outdoor activities such as Games and Woodland Learning and more creative subjects such as music, drama and art. The children benefit from specialist teachers for PE, swimming, music, Forest School and French.

Children develop their own learning skills and appropriate assessment gives the teachers the information to help develop each child individually. Using the information that we retrieve from both standardised and teacher assessment we differentiate lessons in maths and literacy to ensure that each child is challenged, supported and encouraged to reach their potential.

We use topics to lead our literacy work, which, through captivating the children’s interests, gives us the basis to teach reading, comprehension, writing, grammar, spelling and punctuation. In literacy we follow ELS phonics scheme, Nelson Handwriting and RWI spelling. Our reading books follow the phonics scheme and once children become free readers they move onto Accelerated Reader which continues into the Prep School.

We follow the Letters and Sounds phonics programme and the Think Write cursive handwriting programme. Our reading books are banded and we use a variety of schemes to give children the experience of all types of stories and non-fiction writing.

In maths we follow the White Rose Maths Scheme and also use our topics to generate maths problem solving and investigations. Times tables, number bonds, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are the concepts that we teach to use in our investigative work.

All children will experience one or two lessons of French per week.  The sessions are delivered in the form of games, songs and physical activities which ensures that the lessons are fun and the learning considerable. All classes will enjoy a French breakfast during the year as well as taking part in an assembly performance. Children can join our Spanish Club as an afterschool activity.