Welcome to Reception's class page!

Key Information

We are a class of 18 children. Our teacher is Mrs Benson and our teaching assistant is Mrs Boyd. 

• Homework books will be sent home every Friday and are to be returned the following Thursday. 
• Read at least five times a week to gain Strive for Five. 
• Our PE days are Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• Snack is £1 per week.

• School meals are to be ordered online on Lunch Shop. Please make sure that your child's meals are ordered daily at

  http://www.lunchshop.co.uk/

If you have any questions or concerns please don't hesitate to get in touch with me via Class Dojo. 

Useful Information...

- Achievement assembly... Each Friday a child will be selected as our Learner of the Week and Class Dojo Champion. If this is your child, please remember that they may come in to school the following Friday in non-uniform.

Useful documents and links

As parents you may find these documents useful when assisting your child's development at home. The curriculum map outlines each of the topics which we will be covering over the school year and the newsletters look at the half termly topics and include any additional  information on what will be happening in school.

Science week - March 2023

We incorporated science week into our spring 2 learning challenge, of 'What will we find in space?', collaborating with other subjects such as design and technology through practical activities. Some of the activities we carried out were making slime, exploring light sources and carrying out challenges in the dark tent, speaking about what the blue and green colours on a globe represent and making earth cupcakes, discussing gravity and exploring magnetic forces and learning about the most famous constellations and creating our own representations using marshmallows and twiglets. We had lots of fun and learned so much about space.

Snow day

We were given a rare opportunity to go outside and explore the snow this week, allowing the children to use their senses to explore the natural elements and answering any questions they may have through exploring the snow for themselves. The children made lots of observations about how the ground was wet and how when the snow melted it turned to water. They built up their fine and gross motor skills by squashing the snow together, making snowballs, running and jumping through the snow and even making snow angels. 

Mental Health Awareness week

To raise awareness of mental health in early years, we have have been taking part in calming activities, encouraging the children to really think about their own feelings and discussing why it is important to show kindness to others. Some of the activities included a scavenger hunt; outside in the forest looking for natural objects, learning some new yoga moves in PE and discussing keeping healthy and also controlling our breathing to create worry monsters, using watercolour paints and straws.

Spring 1

This half term we are looking at  'Real Life Superheroes'. We have been focusing our learning on one profession each week and looking at the people closest to us in the community and amongst our own family and friends. We have so far enjoyed visits in school from the Police and Red Watch fire crew, who gave us lots of insight in to how they help people and gave us lots of opportunities to ask questions.

Autumn 1

This half term we have been focusing on Traditional Tales, focusing mainly on the story of the Gingerbread Man. The children have enjoyed lots of different activities, which have focused on different areas of our curriculum. Some of these activities include making gingerbread men, building bridges for the gingerbread man to escape the hungry fox and making ginger play dough for the children to stamp their names into.

Mastery Maths

In Reception we follow White Rose Maths. This programme of study allows children to learn practically while utilising the learning environment. We build upon core principles that allow children to progress their mathematical skills throughout the year. Creating a mathematically rich learning environment also provides children with opportunities to develop, practice and consolidate their skills in different contexts and using different media. 

We also use Numberblocks to support the cementing of newly learned numeracy areas- all of these videos can be accessed for free on BBC iPlayer. Please use the link below to access them at home.

Alongside our maths lessons, the children enjoy playing different maths games, some of these can be found online on Top Marks- please use the link below to access these. 

Read Write Inc.

We have daily Read Write Inc. sessions, streaming Reception and Year 1, where we practise saying each sound and segment words with our focused sound in, reading the sounds aloud to blend words back together. Our lessons include lot of modelling and repetition, helping the children to recognise their focused sounds in the environment and to support them when using their letter/sound representations in their writing. We also use the letter formation rhymes to support the children when writing them.

Below is a chart, which will help your child to form their letters at home.

Alongside our phonics lessons, we enjoy playing different phonics games in our class. Some of our favourite online games can be found on Phonics Play, please use the link below to access the website and play the games at home. 

Strive for Five

If your child reads at home five times each week, for a full half term, they will receive a prize on the final day of half term. Each time your child reads, please record this in their reading record.

Below is an image of the 'Strive for Five' display board in the Reception classroom. Each of the children are runners and their aim is to run from the startpoint to checkpoint 5, at the top of the mountain, each week. Each checkpoint marks off how many times the children have read that week. The children love to check how well they are doing and understand that if they are at checkpoint 2, they need to read 3 more times to get to the top. At the beginning of each week, the children go back to the starting point and begin their weekly reading journey again.

Try day Friday

Each Friday the Reception children and any wrap around nursery children are encouraged to try a new food. We always discuss what the food looks like and where it has came from or even how it grows before showing the children what the food looks like on the inside. Often the food is a piece of fruit or vegetable that the children may not have had before or they have also tried cheese and prawn crackers (for Chinese new year). The children often have mixed opinions to whether they like the new food or not and sometimes the children go home and tell their families that they have found something new that they like.