Welcome back!
Welcome back Reception! We hope you have had a lovely half term holiday and look forward to hearing all about the fun things you have been doing. We are now beginning our final half term together in Reception. It seems like only yesterday that you were starting school back in September! During this half term we will support the children in preparation for their transition into Year 1 next year. We have already begun to join Year 1 and Year 2 on the playground at play time on a Thursday and the children have enjoyed going on the 'big' playground. Over the coming weeks, the children will have several opportunities to visit the Year 1 classroom and to spend some time with their Year 1 teacher. We will be holding a meeting for Reception parents towards the end of the year to go through the changes your child can expect as they move into year 1 and to give you the opportunity to meet Year 1 staff and ask any questions. Letters will be sent home with the children shortly.
We have lots of fun things to look forward to during our last few weeks on Reception. We will begin the term with our topic on 'castles' and will be having our class dress up day on Wednesday 12th June! Following this topic we will be thinking about animals and looking after pets. Our class trip to the Ezone is planned for Wednesday 19th June and letters will be sent home to parents this week. We will finish our year by thinking about people who help us and reflecting on the sorts of jobs the children want to do when they are older. What a busy term it is going to be!
During our maths sessions we will continue to practise our addition and subtraction skills and will also be learning number facts such as doubles, halves and number bonds off by heart. We will begin to learn to count in steps of 2 and 10 also.
Look out for our weekly newsletters. These will give you lots of information about what we will be learning each week in more detail and about any upcoming events. These will be sent out each week via Parent Mail or can be found below or requested via the school office.
If you have any questions, please come in and speak to one of the Reception Team and we will do our very best to help.
Mrs Darby, Mrs Price and Mrs Partridge
What to expect in Reception
In our class we have phonics and number sessions every day. We also complete speaking and listening activities and 'talk for writing' activities most days. We follow 'Letters and Sounds' for our phonics and also enhance this with Jolly Phonics.
When children first start school we share books without any words while they learn how to to blend letters to form words. Once they have mastered this they will have a reading book with short sentences and a bag of high frequency words to learn. We have several different reading schemes we use in school to offer a broad and varied experience of books. We have Oxford reading Tree Floppy Phonics, Oxford reading Tree Decode and Develop and Oxford Reading Tree Fireflies and Snapdragons. The three schemes allow phonics skills and key word skills to be developed.
Throughout the day, the children get regular times to explore their own interests through play and many of our teacher directed activities have a play based approach.
We fully understand that children are unique and all develop at their own rates. Activities in the classroom are differentiated to meet the variety of needs.