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. In addition to the team, we have our apprentices Miss Kat.

Dear parents and carers, 

We would like to take this opportunity to welcome all of our wonderful children to Reception. It will be an absolute pleasure to be part of their learning journey and development and we cannot wait to see each child flourish.

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) and Maths 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 Autumn term our new topic will be ‘I wonder where we call home?’. Children will have the opportunity to share a variety of stories linked with this topic and be thinking about their own home. They will be encouraged to role-play some of the stories, be creative and share their ideas with others. 

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.

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 patterns and also create their own patterns.  

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.

This half term the children will be taking part in PE every Thursday with Mrs Finch, focusing on dance.

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