Welcome to Reception

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

We would like to welcome you back after the Easter break and hope you enjoyed your time off together. 

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 Literacy session (taught through The Write Stuff) 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 first part of the summer term our new topic will be ‘I wonder what holidays were like in the past?’ We will be learning about holidays in the past and comparing with holidays today. In the second half term of the summer term our topic will be ‘I wonder about our amazing world’ We will be learning about similarities and differences between countries.

During our Phonics sessions children will be continuing Basic 3 of Supersonic Phonic Friends. Basic 3 finishes the remainder 6 single phonemes and then moves onto digraphs and trigraphs (2 and 3 letters which go together to make one sound ie. /ai/ /sh/). They will be working on recognising these new phonemes and will also practise blending them to read words. The children will also be taught tricky words, which are words the children can not segment and blend, but they just have to know.

In Maths children will be consolidating number bonds to 10, counting beyond 20, addition and subtraction, looking at odd and even numbers and counting in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s.

During RE the children will be looking at Christianity – what happens in our church and also what makes every person special, unique and important.  

At St Mary’s outdoor learning in 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