The Infant Department in The English School of Asturias is made up of two Key Stages: Foundation Stage (3 – 5 years) and Key Stage One (5 – 7 years). This extends beyond the three years of Spanish Infant Education to include the first year of Spanish Primary Education. Both Key Stages are crucial to the personal, social, creative, investigative, numerical and linguistic development of every child.

The department is self contained, with its own playground, including play equipment suitable for infants. Here they are monitored by members of staff at all times during their playtime to ensure their safety. Although infant children use other facilities within the school, they have separate lunchtimes and the day is structured to correspond to their needs, whilst still respecting the overall timetable of the start and end of the school day.

Foundation Stage (3 to 5)

The children in The English School of Asturias enter the Foundation Stage at 3 years of age, in the Nursery class (1º de Educación Infantil). Every year, the Nursery class makes up the greatest part of our new intake of children. At the beginning of the school year, teachers in the Nursery class work bilingually with the children in order to build relationship bridges and to settle the new children into their new school. The emphasis soon shifts to using English as the main language spoken in the class once the children feel settled in this new learning environment, and their understanding of routine vocabulary and simple instructions in English soon takes off. It is here that the children will gain their first taste of the language that they will be using throughout the further stages of their education.

This key stage consists of two year groups: Nursery/1º de Educación Infantil (3 to 4 years of age) and Reception/2º de Educación Infantil (4 to 5 years of age).

The development of Nursery and Reception aged children follows the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage and the six areas for development for children in this age range are:

• Personal, social and emotional development;
• Communication, language and literacy;
• Problem solving, reasoning and numeracy;
• Knowledge and understanding of the world;
• Physical development;
• Creative development.

We place special emphasis on stimulating these areas of learning in a familiar, secure and happy place. The children’s learning environment, in particular the well resourced, bright classrooms and the specific experience of staff in the school enable rapid integration into school life even for the youngest pupils.

The Nursery class works differently from the Reception classes, due to the fact that all Nursery children spend their first year as a complete unit – without separating into the two form entry classes which make up the rest of the Infant Department. The Nursery consists of two large classrooms, and a teaching team made up of two bilingual teachers, and additional, bilingual support workers, working as a group to ensure that children learn according to their learning styles and needs, through play, exploration, investigation, movement, story and music.

When children move into the Reception class, they are split into two separate classes, with tutor and teaching assistant. The main focus in Reception is to build on spoken language skills, and to begin the mechanics of reading in both English and Spanish, as well as to develop understanding in number skills. Reception children still follow the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage – based on the six learning areas mentioned previously, but follow the Jolly Phonics reading program, and use the Oxford Reading Tree scheme for developing reading.

Learning is topic based, using stories and themes to develop learning throughout the curriculum. British and Spanish teaching teams develop their units of work together, in order to maintain continuity of topics and concepts in both languages.

Key Stage One (5 to 7 years)

When children complete the Foundation Stage, they move into the next cycle of education, known as Key Stage One, another two year cycle, beginning with Year One/3º de Educación Infantil (5 to 6 years of age) and closing with Year Two/1º de Educación Primaria (6 to 7 years of age).

This Key Stage is also two form entry. Year One classes have a tutor and an assistant, and the Year Two class tutors share a teaching assistant across both classes.

Children in Key Stage One follow the National Curriculum for England and Wales. In Year One, children have one Spanish language lesson per day, but as they progress into Year Two, their Spanish curriculum extends to include Social Sciences (Conocimiento del Medio).

All other subjects English, Mathematics, Science, Geography, History, Art, Design and Technology, PE and PSHE are taught in English.

The focus in this Key Stage shifts from learning through play to practical, yet progressively more abstract learning. Developing more sophisticated reading skills is a key area of teaching and learning in Years One and Two. Children are taught, using Jolly Phonics, as well as other phonological teaching methods, to develop their sight recognition of key words in English, as well as using phonic strategies to decode words by breaking them down into their simplest sound forms. This is reinforced by graphic and contextual word recognition. Children develop their word knowledge repertoire by looking for meaning in pictures, at the same time as linking initial letter sounds to the words recognized in illustrations. This is a tremendously complex process for native speakers of English, and does take infant children at The English School of Asturias a little longer to work through, given that they are not learning in their native language, but with regular practice at home, Year One and Year Two children make tremendous progress.

In Mathematics, children in Key Stage One develop understanding of number and place value, work with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, money, time, measurement and data handling. Children work both practically and abstractly in lessons, following the National Primary Strategy for Numeracy.

These two years of Infant Education are essentially dedicated to integration and preparation, in which students come into contact with the learning strategies that, although still simple, will be applied in later years as the children move up into Key Stage Two.

The teaching staff in the Infant Department work hard on a daily basis to encourage children in all aspects of co-operative play. Not only does this develop social skills and form friendship groups, which helps to raise each child’s self esteem, but it also works to build the foundations of the life skills of human relationships. The Infant team works to show children the importance of listening to each other, respecting the feelings of other children and adults, as well as working hard to help children understand how to avoid conflicts or arguments. Naturally, this is all part of playground and classroom life, but our aim is to encourage tolerance, patience, care and friendship to be second nature to every child in our school.