Welcome to Reception

Mrs Mutarah and Miss Carroll are the Reception teachers and are assisted by Mrs Miss Hulstone, who is our fantastic Early Years Practitioner and Miss Thorpe and Miss Aktar, who are amazing Learning Support practitioners.

Dear parents and carers, 

We hope you all had a restful half term break.

In Reception, we learn alongside the Development Matters National Curriculum for children in the Early Years Foundation Stage. Throughout all of our work, the staff in Reception will be assessing the children against the objectives outlined within this document and also use it to ensure that all individual needs are being met. 

In Reception, children will have daily Phonics (taught through Supersonic Phonic Friends), Maths and The Write Stuff session in the morning and Topic sessions during the afternoon. Children are introduced to their new learning challenges in small groups. This is then further developed through child-initiated learning that takes place throughout the day. Learning is promoted in both the indoor and outdoor environment.

During the new Autumn half term, our new topic will be ‘I wonder what happens in Winter?’. Children will have the opportunity to share a variety of stories linked with this topic and will be thinking about seasonal change. They will be encouraged to role-play some of the stories, be creative and share their ideas with others. After that, the children will learn about the topic 'I wonder what Solids, Liquids and Gasses are?'. This topic will be a science focus where children will get the opportunity to complete simple experiments, make predictions and discuss changes they observe. 

During our Phonics sessions children will be progressing onto Basic 2 of Supersonic Phonic Friends. Basic 2 will introduce single phonemes as well as some digraph and trigraphs (2 and 3 letters which go together to make one sound ie. /ck/ /ss/). They will be working on recognising these new phonemes and will also practise blending them to read words. Children will now begin to write simple captions based on the sounds taught during Phonics.

In Maths children will be exploring numbers up to 5. The children will have the opportunity to explore these numbers by touch counting, selecting 5 objects from a large group, recognising the numerals, matching the numerals to quantity and dividing groups equally. During our sessions we will also be exploring shapes with 4 sides (squares and rectangles).

At St Mary’s outdoor learning is very important to us, Reception promotes this by taking part in ‘Muddy Mondays’. Every Monday afternoon children spend time learning in the outdoor environment, they are given opportunities to explore, discover and take on new challenges.

Please ensure the children bring to school appropriate clothing such as a puddle suit (see our uniform requirements for more information), jogging bottoms and wellies/walking boots. If you need further information regarding clothing, please contact a member of the Reception team. 

Thank you,

Reception team