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Reception - St Mary

Welcome to Reception!

Class teachers - Miss Beaumont and Mrs Mulryan

Support Staff: Miss Dawson and Miss Ferdousy

The Early Years Framework

Your child will follow the DFE (Department for Education) EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) framework and will work towards the final assessment at the end of the Reception year, using the ELGs (Early Learning Goals). These goals are short statements that teachers assess your child against at the end of the year. The 7 main areas of learning are;

Communication and Language
Physical Development
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Literacy
Mathematics
Expressive Arts and Design
Understanding the World

As part of the framework there is less emphasis on recording paperwork, meaning we, as adults, can spend more time with your child getting to know them and having those quality interactions. The new framework is also more aligned with the KS1 curriculum, further ensuring your child’s educational journey from Reception to KS1 is building upon previous knowledge.

The Reception classroom

The Early Years (Nursery and Reception classes) gate opens at 8:35am and closes at 8.45am. If your child is late they will need to enter the school through the school office. Please ensure your child arrives promptly to school each day.

At the end of the day, the doors open at 3.10pm. Please arrive on time to collect your child. If you are going to be late please contact the school office. We have Cuthbert Cubs wrap-around provision available everyday until 6pm for a small charge. Please make payment via the Parentmail app and contact the school office.

Our learning through the year

Through the year we guide and progress the children in the 7 inter-connected areas of learning and development within the EYFS Framework.

These 7 areas are:

Prime Areas:

Communication and Language (Listening, Attention and Understanding, Speaking)

Personal, Social and Emotional Development (Self-Regulation, Managing Self and Building Relationships)

Physical Development (Gross Motor Skills and Fine Motor Skills)

Literacy (Comprehension, Word Reading and Writing)

Maths (Number and Numerical Pattern)

Understanding the World (Past and Present, People, Culture and Communities and The Natural World)

Expressive Arts and Design (Creating with Materials and Being Imaginative and Expressive)

We monitor the children's progression through adult and child daily interactions, observations during whole class, group, individual teaching and play during continuous provision.

Autumn 1

Key Question - Is everyone's family the same?

Maths

In Maths we will be learning cardinality and counting - connecting numbers to quantities, understanding that the last number counted tells you 'how many', and using counting songs and actions to help these ideas stick. We will be learning to subitise - recognise small quantities instantly without counting one by one. We will be comparing sets of objects using the language of 'more than', 'fewer' or 'the same as.' We will be exploring the composition of numbers - beginning to see how numbers are made up of smaller numbers (hiding numbers). We will also explore initial concepts of size, compare attributes like length or height, and match/sort 2D shapes. We use NCETM to guide our planning.

Literacy

We teach the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Phonics programme to support the development of early literacy skills. This half term we begin with Phase 2 sounds, where children learn the first individual sounds (phonemes) and the graphemes that represent them. They will learn to apply these phonemes to read and write short words. The sounds taught this half term will be as follows and in this order: s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, l.

For more detailed information on the phonics phases and resources to support at home, please see the Little Wandle website: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/ and click on the parents tab.

We will also be doing lots of mark making in a variety of contexts and for varied purposes, encouraging the use of the letter formation as we learn them. We will be working hard on our speaking and listening skills, having paired discussions with our 'talk partners', telling our news and sharing lots of stories and rhymes. We will also be using the Early Years 2 Primary scheme to support our teaching of writing. Linking with our phonics programme, we will immerse the children in high-quality texts and provide writing opportunities and enhancements to our areas of provision linked in with the focus text.

Understanding of the World

This half term the children will be sequencing their own life events and discussing how they have changed over time from baby through to toddler to now. Children will talk about their own families, people who are important to them and their local community. They will earn about the role of people who help us in the community, and we will invite visitors in to share more about what they do. We will also learn the names of key body parts.

Expressive Arts and Design

We will create self portraits using a variety of mediums. We will create family portraits using natural materials. We will create art using our hand and fingerprints and we will experiment with colour mixing.

Religious Education

We use the schemes, Lighting the Path and Caritas in our RE lessons. Below is an overview of what we will cover over in the Autumn term.

The themes and topics will be:

Local church - community: celebrating

Eucharist-relating: gathering

Lent/Easter-giving: growing

Rights and responsibilities: God wants everyone to be happy. God give us all we need to be happy. Making the right choices. We all share God's gifts.

As part of our Catholic ethos. we love to involve family life within our school life and may ask you for photos of special events or people, such as baptism, Christmas and other important celebrations to reflect upon in our weekly Collective Worship sessions.

PE (Physical Education) in Reception will take place on a Friday. Your child should arrive at school wearing their PE kits each Friday. They will not need their standard school uniform on this day as they will stay in their PE kits all day.

As in line with our school uniform policy, your child’s PE kit should be as follows:

Plain navy joggers (no brands or logos).
A pair of trainers (velcro trainers if they cannot tie their laces independently).

Things to remember

Please ensure that all of your child's belongings are clearly labelled - any unlabelled items that we are unable to identify will go in the lost property box, which we will leave beside the door each day at dismissal.
Please ensure you send your child in with suitable outdoor clothing such as a waterproof coat and wellies, as throughout the day children have continued access to both the indoor and outdoor areas of provision.
Please ensure you send your child in with a labelled water bottle filled with plain water, ideally.
If you would like a quick chat with us then you are welcome to approach us at the end of the day once the majority of children have been collected. If you would like a more in depth/private chat then please contact the office to arrange a call or meeting.

Home Learning

Book bags and reading books will be issued on a Friday at the end of the day. These need to be returned each Friday morning.

Daily activities to complete with your child-

Regular name writing practice - please encourage your child to practice writing their first name, encouraging them to use an upper-case letter for their initial and lower-case letters for the other letters.

Daily reading practice - please continue to engage with daily reading with your child; this could be through singing rhymes, poems and songs also as well as reading stories. It is really beneficial to read aloud to your child each day. This will prepare them to succeed as a reader. Bedtime stories are so valuable to encourage good future reading habits with your child.

Daily number/counting practice - Counting up to 5, 10 and beyond. Sing number songs and rhymes. Using mathematical language such 'more' and 'less'-this could be done when playing or when preparing food together. Go on a number hunt around the home or outdoors-focus on identifying numerals 0-10. Order numerals to 5 and then 10.

Reading eggs – once a week https://readingeggs.co.uk

Reading eggs makes learning to read interesting and engaging for kids, with great online reading games and activities. Children love the games, songs, golden eggs and other rewards which, along with feeling proud of their reading, really motivate children to keep exploring and learning.

My Maths and Mathseeds – once a week https://mathseeds.co.uk/

Mathseeds is an online website that your child can use to develop pupils’ confidence and fluency in Maths and the interactive lessons provide step-by-step examples to break down learning into manageable chunks. The log in for this is the same one you use for reading eggs.

Phonics home learning – once a week

Please continue to practise the phonemes we have learnt using the weekly phonics sheets in your child's phonics book.

You can then practise these sounds further on fastphonics (www.readingeggs.co.uk/fast-phonics-games), which is the same log in as reading eggs.

Learning logs

Pupil, parent and teacher voice all showed that project based home learning was the preferred style of home learning as it gave children more freedom to learn about real life world events, share personal experiences and it has helped motivate them to engage in home learning as it is child managed. It encourages the children to be more independent, inquisitive and provides more opportunities for outdoor learning together. This can be completed in your learning log or a scrap book of your choice.

Instead of completing these every half term, we have reduced this to three half terms a year to make it more manageable. They will therefore be given out on the first Monday of Autumn 2, Spring 2 and Summer 2. We ask that their project is brought into school on the last week of that half term to share and celebrate with their peers. You will be given a sheet of paper that will be stuck in your child’s learning log that will outline what the project is and ideas of activities you can do.

Please find below lots of useful websites and links to great resources that can be used

to support your child's learning at home!

Government support for home learning for children aged 0-5 years - https://hungrylittleminds.campaign.gov.uk/

Phonics websites

Mr Mc is doing fun and interactive daily phonics lessons for children age 4-5. He focuses on new digraphs and has lots of different ways to revisit already learnt sounds.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTcZnvuTeovlznioLRo0GOA/videos

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk

https://monsterphonics.com/games/

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/phase-3-games.html

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/english-games/5-7-years/letters-and-sounds

https://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/literacy.html

https://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/alphablocks

Phonics apps

Jolly Phonics Lessons

Meet the alphablocks

Read with phonics games