School Curriculum

I'm not considering HE at this time, but my eldest is going into Reception in the fall and I would like to start spending time everyday in a more structured way to get him prepared. he's also desperate to read and very good with adding. Any hints or what you're doing would be appreciated, thank yoU!

The curriculum currently in place for Reception is called 'Early Years Foundation Stage and supported by a document called 'development matters'. Learning is largely based in play and real life experiences rather than formal 'schooling' in reception. A new EYFS has just been released and will be implemented in September 2012 - to be honest not much has changed in content but they have rearranged it from 6 strands into 7 and jammed some of the outcomes together

You can find all the documents here

The current government favours synthetic phonic teaching http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/what-is-letters-and-sounds.html. This is not the only part of reading - knowing words that can't be sounded out on sight, using pictures as clues, reading for meaning / what makes sense etc are all important as well.

TBH, reading high quality books and talking to your LO about things you see and do each day are the best way to go. Cooking, counting out fruit or veg or looking at signs and prices when shopping, counting out blocks are they are played with, looking at numbers on buses, talking about why things happen, pouring, touching, painting - all the things you are probably doing already.

If you want to be more structured you could set up a bit of a loose routine of what happens at different times of the day (reading time, art time, cooking, trips out to museums etc) but you can achieve just as much by being guided by what your LO wants to do and playing along side while asking 'pondering' questions eg: 'Hmm, I wonder what would happen if...., What do you think will happen next? How will I work out how much flour to put in?' etc etc.

HTH a little bit

Great advice Sim

Thank you so much! Loads of information there, so I'm going to have to begin to trawl through.

I guess specifically I really want to look at the phonics curriculum as it's different to the one I'm used to and he's soo desperate to read so i would like to give him 15-20 min a day on the phonics. I think he'd like the time sitting down with just him as well as my house is insane with 2 boys!

We had some Carol Vorderman books that we got from Amazon and we used them with Martha, also it sounds daft but the cBeebies comics have somevery good exercises in them. Martha could read simple words like jet, cat, etc before she started but they go through all the combined sounds like ch, oa, ee etc at school. They also do Maths books and writing books.

You can also buy Jolly Phonics books at Mothercare/ ELC. The main issue we found with Martha was that her writing skills were not at the same level as her reading so she struggles with some of the workbooks in terms of the size of the space for writing answers etc. So the writing workbooks were good because they helped her with practice eg drawing wavy lines etc.

Very much like Ruth has posted, India could read and write simple words before she went to school but she is the oldest in her year. To 'teach' phonics I used a wooden alphabet snake that India absolutely loved (to do about 10 times a day lol). We started off with the name of the letter, then the sound and then words that started with that letter. She also loves a jolly phonics DVD with Inky Mouse in it. We also have some activity books from this range and she enjoys them too.

Thank you all so much, this is really helpful. Thomas will be the eldest in his class too this year, he's definitely one that should've been in school as I feel I can't keep him engaged enough!