Welcome To Reception!
Welcome to our Reception class, we are looking forward to making lots of memories in our first year of school together. We will make lots of friendships and have lots of fun throughout the year. Our adults who help us in Reception are Miss Austin, Mrs Brettle and Mrs Hoult.
OUR CURRICULUM
What is special about me? We are launching into September with the topic focusing on ourselves; identifying our feelings, discussing the family in our house and our extended family and also talking about our pets. This term we will also be focusing on effective learning behaviours, such as using our ‘Good listening’ rules and how we can follow instructions.
What is special about autumn? We will be identifying signs of Autumn through exploring both the indoor and outdoor learning environments. We will also discuss the changes in weather and how we can keep ourselves safe in the Autumn months. We will then move on to exploring different woodland animals and their habitats, as well as identifying which animals are nocturnal. In our ‘Celebrate’ unit, we then explore Diwali and share how Hindus celebrate the special event, discussing similarities and differences for how we celebrate special events, such as our birthdays or Christmas.
What is in my world? We start the spring term by discussing our locality, looking closely at our school and our local community. The children will begin to draw simple maps of familiar environments to them and learn about what buildings there are in their town. We then start to look closely at signs of winter and how we can stay safe in the winter months. This term we will also explore changing states of matter, through exploring ice. The children will then learn about other parts of their world, particularly Africa through exploring the key text Handa’s surprise by Eileen Browne.
How is my world changing? We will begin this topic by identifying how to respect and care for our world, such as through putting our litter in the bin so that it does not harm animals or their habitats. We then look closely at where our rubbish goes and how we can sort our rubbish into different materials. We also look at the jobs of people in our local community and how they take our rubbish. The children will explore how we can repurpose our rubbish, rather than throw it away and how rubbish can be made into something new like a kite!
What’s at the bottom of my garden? In this topic we will spend lots of time in our outdoor area and forest school, hunting for and identifying which different minibeasts we can find. We will closely observe these minibeasts, using our observations to help us design and make our own minibeast out of clay. The children will also learn about the life cycle of a butterfly.
What’s special about Summer? In our final Summer term in Reception, we will observe the changes in weather and talk about how we can stay safe in the warm summer months! We also explore different activities that we can do at the beach, in the present day and compare them to things we could do in the past. In the last few weeks of term, we will share and celebrate our achievements throughout the year with our peers and discuss any ambitions we may have for Year 1.
Maths: In Maths, we get to learn through hands-on experiences using concrete and visual resources. The children begin by developing a sound understanding of numbers to 5, such as recognising different representations, comparing amounts and learning all about how numbers are composed of smaller numbers. The children also develop their skills in numeral recognition, numeral ordering and counting with one-to-one correspondence. Once the children are confident with numbers to 5, we then begin to develop their understanding of numbers to ten. The children also progress to explore simple addition and subtraction, as well as solving problems, sharing and halving, doubles and exploring odd and even. Our Maths curriculum, also allows the children to explore positional language, time, 2D and 3D shapes and measuring compacity, mass and length.
English: For English we use high quality texts, such as the Little Red Hen, the Gingerbread man, Jack and the Beanstalk and many more! In this we use talk 4 writing, where we provide lots of opportunities for the children to retell the story through puppets and story trays. Once the children are familiar and able to retell the story, we then begin to make simple changes to the story, so the children begin to create, retell and write their own stories.
PE DAYS
We love being fit and active. We often take part in the daily mile and have dedicated PE lessons every week. Please ensure your child’s PE kit is in school at all times. We are encouraging the children to get dressed independently, as it is a key aspect of the EYFS Curriculum. In PE, we have already learnt about spatial awareness and This term we are going to be developing our ball skills by learning about sending, aiming and receiving.
READING
Our teachers love books in Reception and sharing lovely stories together is a really important part of our day! We love to retell stories by creating story maps and adding actions to our stories. Some of our teachers’ favourite books are…
In our daily Phonics sessions, we will learn how to read and write Set 1 and Set 2 RWI sounds and begin the process for segmenting the sounds in simple words and blending them together to read words.
OUR CLASS READS
OUR SETTING
GROWTH MINDSET
Growth mind set is important to us in Reception and at our school. We believe that it is our attitudes and resilience that helps us to be great and that with hard work and determination we can achieve our goals. In every class we have Max, our motivational monkey who supports us with our growth mindset.
REFERENCES FROM THE CHILDREN
We risked it all and asked Reception to give us a reference, to tell you what we’re really like. Here is what they said about us…
“I like playing with my friends.”
“I love learning to write and I like painting.”