Writing in the EYFS

There are a lot of schools in my local area taking on 'Big Write' type approaches across the whole school. For those of you not familiar with 'Big Write', it essentially involves every child in the school building up to a write across the week and then once a week (usually Friday) writing for at least 30 minutes independently (or 1 to 1 with an adult in some cases). In my opinion, this has no place in a quality EYFS classroom. I have seen brilliant progress from this teaching method but that's mainly because the first pieces of writing the children produce are, of course, just a few marks and letters if you are lucky. The writing I have seen from the end of the year is not on par with the quality of what my children produce over a much shorter time period. So here are my...

6 top tips for getting outstanding writing in the EYFS.

1- Start by teaching quality phonics.
We use Floppy's Phonics as a basis for our phonics teaching across EYFS and Year 1 (where it is taught in a mixed Y1/2 class). As the Phonics lead teacher, I teach phonics across the school due to our flexibility of timetables. We teach phonics from about week 4 in Reception, meaning that the children have learnt all phase 2 sounds before Christmas, as well as roughly 30 of the high frequency/tricky words. We learn how to physically write each sound as we learn it too- in traditional, 3 space/4 lines, handwriting books. We also do the writing in sand, shaving foam etc. approach but found that it didn't work on its own.

2- Have nice, inviting, writing resources inside and out.
We have a small writing area inside the classroom with notebooks (Primark sale is great for these), fancy pens (Asda, Tiger, Poundland), glittery pencils, stampers etc. There are also clipboards available and a post-box (Hobbycraft). Every now and then, we'll put in new things like envelopes, cards and glittery whiteboards.
Outside we have some Ikea hanging pots with pens, pencils, highlighters, rulers etc. and more notebooks, sticky notes etc. Alongside all of these, are 'writers toolbelts' (TTS) that the children can carry around with them with all of their chosen resources in.

3- Give the children reasons to write.
There in no better way to get the children to want to write than to make it purposeful. If there's a reason for it, they'll want to do it. Some examples...

• When changing after PE, the children hang up their PE kits in the cloakroom and then write their name on my special clipboard (in a list that I, or another adult, ensures is done correctly to make it fair). Before we get ready to go home, I close my eyes and pick out a sticker sheet from a selection. We go through the list of names in order giving out stickers until they are all gone (or the list is finished). I tend to use sticker sheets that have around 20 stickers on them so at the beginning of the year, all of my 15 children are guaranteed to get a sticker, then after a few weeks, to try and speed them up a bit, I add in some sheets that already have some stickers used. Sometimes only 1 child gets a sticker sometimes almost all do. It's great for encouraging them to write their names in a useful way.
• Outside, near the bikes and scooters, we have a chalkboard with a sand timer attached (Cosy Catalogue). If the bike or scooter that the child wants to go on is being used, they write their name on the board and start the timer. When the timer finishes, it is their turn to go on the bike.
• Throughout our topics, all of our role-play areas have reasons to write attached e.g. during the Space topic, we get letters from our local 'Space Agency' (me!) asking the children to investigate things and let them know what they found out. There is no pressure to write, they can communicate however they like, but some children will choose to. When Barnaby Bear travels the world, he sends us emails and the children have the chance to write postcards to him or emails of their own.
• Use the other classes and teachers in school, or pre-school. "Let's make a book about all of the exciting things we do at school to send to the children at pre-school", "Let's send a card to your new teacher telling them something about you that she needs to know" etc.
• Use the books that the children love. Pete the Cat was the favourite book of my class last year so we wrote our own version of it. The children loved it so much they showed it to the Ofsted inspector when she visited and it got a mention in the final report.

4- Have as many word & picture labels around the room as you can and model using them for writing.

Particularly in role-play areas, label the area with word and picture cards. Websites like Twinkl have ones you can print or make your own. When you model how to use the role-play area, or play alongside the children, show them how they can use those words to help with their writing. It means that you've put them there for a reason rather than just classroom decoration too.

5- Praise.
Praise the children when they attempt to write even if it's not that good! The more they enjoy writing, the more they will want to do it. There are lots of great stickers out there with a writing theme too.

6- Don't put any pressure on the children to write too early.

This really is my main focus when it comes to writing success. If you wait until the children are ready to write (within reason) then you will get better results. We don't do any whole class writing or teaching of writing until after the Easter holidays. After this point, most of the children are phonically ready to be good writers and some of the difficulties are reduced. We do then do quite a lot of writing activities to ensure the children can show what they are capable of. For example...

• After teaching the phase 2 and 3 phonic sounds, we split the children into 3 different groups: children still struggling at phase 2 (LA), children needing a small amount of help at phase 3 (AA) and children who are comfortable with all of that and capable of more (HA). The HA children then learn some common vowel alternatives e.g. 'ay' and 'ea' as well as split digraphs. The AA take part in a TELL phonics intervention, re-capping the digraphs and trigraphs from phase 3 and the LA re-cap any phase 2 sounds they have struggled with. After May half term, the LA and HA groups come together to do a more structured 'literacy' session whilst the AA continue with phonics.
• For the last 20 minutes of the day, once a week, parents are invited in for a 'Parents in Class' writing session (Autumn term- reading, Spring term- maths, Summer term- writing) where every child is set a writing challenge designed to write for different styles. The children who have parents that join us (maybe 3 or 4 regularly) work with them, and myself and my TA support the weaker children with the Higher Ability working independently. Each week, we do a different kind of writing e.g. recounts, stories, letters, lists etc.
• Every week, a new writing challenge is introduced (as well as other subjects/areas of learning). If the children complete the challenge, they get a reward of team points and a sticker. Things that have worked well include giving the children an alphabetical list and asking them to write a word starting with each letter or creating a new menu for the role-play cafe.

Teaching writing isn't always easy but in my opinion, there is no point trying to get the children doing good quality writing until they are ready. 

It is exactly the same as maths, you wouldn't expect the children to use numbers to 100 if they can't count to 10 so why expect them to write if they can't speak a sentence or recognise letter sounds. 

Don't make writing a chore at the start of their school life and hopefully they will continue to be keen to show what they can do.

Initial Assessment

In my post about Transition into the EYFS, I talked about getting as much information as you can from any pre-school setting (s) that the children have attended. No matter how much information you get though, it's really important to carry out your own detailed initial assessments. It should become the basis of everything you do for the rest of the year.

Top 5 tips for initial assessment

1- Baseline Assessment
This September was meant to be the first year of the official baseline assessment. Schools had a chance to trial the available assessments last year ready for 2016. BUT... the government has decided to scrap the baseline assessment as the different types are not comparable and it can't be used to track progress across all schools. That doesn't mean that you can't still use them for in house assessment. We trialed 2 of the different baselines available last year and will again be using one of them this year.

• NFER- we used this practical baseline assessment with all of our EYFS children last year. I chose it because of the practical nature using real resources as well as pictures. It gave us a clear idea of what the children could and could not do on entry and helped us to know where to go next. I was able to decide if the children needed to continue with a section or if I had seen enough and we were able to stop at any time to suit the needs of the children.
• CEM Base- we used this computer based assessment with a few children as a comparison. I chose it to see if the computer based system would be more engaging for the children. In truth, the opposite seemed to be true, and the children that tried it were not that keen. I also found it to be very repetitive for example, when assessing the children's ability to recognise letters, I expected it to check a few from throughout the alphabet and use that as a basis for the assessment but NO! It asked the child to go through every letter in both lower case and then upper case for sounds and then letter names. Yes it is important to be thorough but I don't think we need to go through all 26 letters (twice) and then digraphs to know whether a child can recognise letters or not. This was just one part of the assessment and both the children, and myself, were bored by the end of just that section.
• Early Excellence- many of my colleagues in other schools chose this option as it was considered the most child friendly. No formal sit down 'testing' but based on adult observations. We chose not to go with this option ourselves as we felt that it was very much like what we did anyway so what was the point of paying for it.

This year we will again use the NFER resources as a formal baseline assessment of every child.

2- Focused Observations

In the first half term, we carry out at least 2 focused observations of each child. This gives us a chance to follow their child initiated play and make some initial observations mainly for PSED & CLL scale points and others dependent on the sort of activities they choose. We use these observations to add to our other initial assessments.

3- Playing with the children

Sometimes I think that the most easily overlooked aspect of initial assessments is simply being brave enough to spend time playing with the children. I have to make time in my timetable for this each week otherwise I find myself spending more time sitting back and watching (which is worthwhile) rather than getting involved. The difficulty with this is in trying not to take over and letting the children lead what happens otherwise your observations can be skewed.

4- Whole class activities

We always carry out some whole class activities as a way of initially assessing the children, particularly for phase 1 phonic skills and maths. I use my TA to take notes as I lead the session, giving us an idea of what the children are already capable of.

5- Recording initial assessments

This year I have created a proforma with a page for each of the 17 ELG's. I have copied all of the statements from the 30-50 and 40-60+ age bands (not including the ELG's) and created a simple tick list, with the children's names along the top. My plan is to use this with my TA to keep a simple record of what the children can and can not do. I will use this to collate all of the information we get from the different ways of assessing the children to create a really clear picture of where they are, ages & stage wise, on entry. This data will then be recorded onto their individual tracking sheets that I will talk about more in my 'Progress Tracking' post.

To me, most of these ideas are just common sense and I'm sure it's what most people are doing anyway but I try never to assume!

The Classroom Environment- September

The classroom environment is one of the most important aspects in the EYFS. I try to keep the classroom fresh and interesting by changing the room linked to our topics and will post about this in more detail on my other blog 'The Role Play Corner'.

It's not always easy and sometimes I end up 'popping in' to school on a Saturday afternoon to set everything up for the new topic on a Monday but lots of things make it worthwhile. The children walking in to the newly decorated classroom and saying "Wow! This is amazing!" and then running outside to find their friends and parents to bring them in and show them what they have seen, children refusing to have time off school when they are ill because they don't want to miss out on what we might be doing and older children in the school saying "It's not fair, your classroom is so much better than ours!".

The only exception to this exciting space is September.

When you walk in to my classroom on the first day of term, it looks awful. But it's meant to.

I put up nothing.

I want the children to understand WHY everything is there so I don't 'decorate' my classroom with mountains of printing and laminating from Sparklebox or Twinkl- what's the point of it all? When they first walk in, the classroom walls are empty and then it becomes their classroom. 

• The children make their own peg labels for the cloakroom and then choose where in the cloakroom they would like their peg to be.
• I take a photograph of each child and they choose their favourite colour from a selection of paper that will go on the wall, with their photo, to be their own personal display space. Over the year, they get to add photos, drawings and other things special to them, to their space.
• We have an initial circle time session where we talk about favourite colours and favourite things to get to know each other and so I can create a themed nameplate for each of the children's wall displays.
• We assess the children's number recognition and then take funny photos of that number of children to create a number line display- it's personal and the children understand WHY it is then hanging in the classroom.
• We talk about the classroom rules and hang them from the ceiling as we know them (I use pedagogs ones from the PTS sticker catalogue).
• After talking about the classroom rules, we introduce Golden Time and set up our golden time wall display.
• We talk about needing to know what we will do each day and set up the display for calendar and visual timetable.
• When we start to take home wordless ORT reading books, we display pictures and name labels of the main characters.
• This year, as we introduce the children to each of the areas of the classroom, I intend to display 'We are...' captions from Twinkl, saying things like 'We are Artists', 'We are Explorers' or 'We are Actors' in the appropriate areas. I want the children (and any adults that come into my room) to see WHY the things are there. I saw this idea on Pinterest ages ago and think it's great but haven't got round to it yet, this is a starter for it.

By the end of the first week or two, it looks like most other EYFS classrooms but the children OWN everything that is there.

Transition into the EYFS

I thought I'd start with my top tips for a smooth transition

1- get the children into school as much as you can before they are due to start-

Sounds obvious but there are different ways this can be done of course. Much is dependent on the number of children and feeder settings you take from but this is what we do:
December- pre-school children are invited to watch the dress rehearsal of our nativity play- they come with the pre-school staff or parents.
February- in the last week before half term we run an activity morning where pre-school children and staff visit us for a themed activity morning (usually Chinese New Year based).
March/April- another activity morning, Easter themed, in the week before the holidays.
May- another activity morning before half term- theme varies.
June/July- I visit all of the children in their pre-school/nursery setting.
July- children visit on their own for a transition morning when all of the children move up to their new class/school for the day.
July- pre-school children and str join us for the dress rehearsal of the end of year KS2 play.

Because our main feeder pre-school has children from the age of 3, who join us for all of the activity mornings and nativity play, some of the children have visited us up to 9 times before they come in on their own.


2- get as much information as you can from any pre-school/nursery settings-

Many of our children go to more than one pre-school/nursery setting. We try to get as much information as we can from all of them to get a good idea of exactly what the children are capable of and the ages & stages they are working at. We keep simple records of that data and then analyse it based on the child's actual age in months.

We don't take this as gospel and do our own on-entry assessments but it helps to give an idea of where the children are.


3- try to find out what the children like-

On our transition morning, we usually read a story called 'Things I Like' by Anthony Browne. It's quick, simple and a great conversation starter. I then use what I learn from that simple story to resource my classroom with things that I know the children will want to use. For example I found out that lots of my children last year liked to dress up and take part in role-play so I made sure that we had some nice new dressing up clothes for both the boys and girls. Next years group are boy heavy and love superheroes so that will form the basis of some of my classroom set-up for September. I won't go completely superhero themed, just make sure that there are some resources they will definitely want to use. The more you can learn about them early on, the easy the transition process will be for everyone.


4- get to know the parents-

After the children have been in for their transition day, we invite parents to come in for their own transition evening. I'll write about it in detail in a separate post but it basically gives us a chance to meet the parents and share all the key information we need them to know about their child's first year with us in school.


5- be prepared-

Make sure that you get as much ready as you can before September arrives. Don't spend all of your holidays working as you'll need the break but spend a few days in school, if you can, getting yourself organised. It will give you less things to worry about in September and mean that you can concentrate on the children. I like to clear out cupboards, organise the layout of the room (more later), sort out resources and label the room to within an inch of its life! The more organised I am, the more ready I feel.

Hi...

Welcome to my blog.

I plan to share lots of great ideas to help your EYFS become Outstanding.

There will be no mention of what Oftsed are looking for, just simple hints and tips that we have used to help us move to Outstanding with our practice (July 2016 Ofsted judgement).

So keep checking back and hopefully you'll find something that helps to improve your practice too.

Vikki