Welcome to Reception!

 

January 2024

Welcome back to the next part of our learning journey at St Christopher’s. We are looking forward to an exciting term of learning with lots of fun things planned.

The children will take part in a wide variety of activities in both our indoor and outdoor settings, covering the 7 areas of learning:

 

Prime Areas

Communication and Language

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

Physical Development

 

Specific Areas

Literacy (including Comprehension, Word Reading & Writing)

Mathematics (including Number & Numerical Patterns)

Understanding the World

Expressive Arts and Design

 

The Reception Team

We are fortunate to have a number of experienced staff who will all play a part in your child’s learning during their year in Reception:

Class Teacher: Mrs Poole

Class Teaching Assistant: Miss Thorp (Mon – Thurs)

Additional TAs: Mrs Onions, Mrs Burns

 

Our topic for the next half term is:

  ‘Exploring our World’

Over the next few weeks we will be exploring:

  • The Arctic
  • Space
  • Under the Sea
  • The Jungle

…and much more!

Our focus stories for this term are:

  • Brave & The Fox
  • Whatever Next!
  • Rainbow Fish
  • Monkey Puzzle
  • The Easter story

The children will explore these stories in detail in order to learn and retell them. Other books we will be reading include:

  • One Snowy Night (Percy the Park Keeper)
  • Stick Man
  • Ice Bear
  • Wanda’s Space Party
  • Commotion in the Ocean
  • Under the Sea
  • Why Elephant has a Trunk
  • Rumble in the Jungle
  • Non-fiction texts about our world

 

Please look at the Topic Briefing posted at the bottom of this page for more detailed information about what we will be covering in each Area of Learning.

 

Religion

In Religion we will finish our Christmas Topic with a focus on the shepherds and Wise Men who visited Jesus. We will then move on to the topic of Baptism, followed by ‘People Who Help Us’ where we will explore the work of the Priest as well as learning about ways in which Jesus helped people when He lived on earth. After half term we will begin our preparations for Easter as we learn about the season of Lent. In the final week of term we will join the rest of the school as we follow Jesus’ journey to the Cross and learn about the events of Holy Week. Our Religion lessons will be taught in a simple and sensitive way that the children will understand, including drama, creative activities, singing and stories.

 

Phonics

Phonics is taught daily in Reception and is vitally important as it provides the early building blocks used to teach children to read and write. At St Christopher’s we follow the Twinkl Phonics Scheme. This half term we will be focusing on Level 3, including sounding out and correctly forming the Level 3 phonemes, learning the next set of tricky words, blending to read words, simple captions and sentences, and segmenting to begin to write words, captions and simple sentences. Children will bring home a phonics Mini Book each week to practise the phonemes they have learnt in phonics lessons, and, by the end of the term, all children will start reading books from our Rhino Readers reading scheme. Please support your children with reading at home – it has been proven that this is the most important thing you can do to help them progress at school. Please try to take a few minutes every day to hear them read their school books and record it in their Reading Diary. The ‘Reading codes’ in the front of the Diary will help you to do this more purposefully. Some children will be given words and/or phonemes to practise. Please make every effort to do this every day as it will improve their blending skills and phoneme recognition, and help them on the way to becoming more fluent readers. Thank you. Busy Book homework will also link directly to phonics lessons at school.

 

English & Maths

This term we will be having a big focus on handwriting, learning to write sentences and number work. We will let you know more specific ways you can help your child, but there are a few things you can be doing all of the time:

  • Encourage your child to write as much as possible – lists, letters to real or imaginary people, simple stories, labels for pictures they have drawn etc. A clip board with paper attached works really well as your child can write in different places and at different times. Have notebooks and paper of different sizes, shapes and colours to make it more interesting for them. To begin with, you may not understand all of their writing but this is an important stage (called emergent writing), so if they are doing their own writing encourage creativity and ideas and don’t always correct what they have written. However, if they are doing ‘formal’ writing with you, please make sure each letter is correctly formed, especially in their name, and encourage them to use ‘phoneme fingers’ to attempt to segment words.
  • Work with your child to recognise numbers to 10 and then 20 if they don’t already know them. Practise in fun ways – use number cards and make trails around the house, or have tricky numbers stuck on the fridge or going up the stairs. Numbers 12, 13 and 15 are often the most tricky ones so practise these frequently. If your child is confident with numbers to 20, practise identifying 1 more or 1 less than a given number and different ways to make numbers to 10 (number bonds).

 

PE

Our PE days this term are Wednesday and Thursday. Children do not need to bring a PE kit to school but come to school dressed in their PE clothes: blue shorts or plain dark blue jogging trousers (depending on the weather), a white T-shirt, school jumper/cardigan, trainers (without laces please). Please adhere to the school uniform guidelines for PE – no other T-shirts/sweatshirts are allowed. It is also important that no jewellery is worn and that hair below shoulder length is tied back.

Advance notice: In the Summer Term, children will need to bring a PE kit to school as they will be getting changed for PE at school as part of their Physical Development goals. Please help your child to prepare for this by encouraging them to get dressed/undressed independently as often as possible. Thank you. (This is for Reception only, not the rest of the school).

 

Outdoors

Please remember to send your child with a warm, waterproof coat if necessary as we will be using our outdoor area every day. Don’t forget to send in a named water bottle every day.

Please make sure all clothes, including PE kit and especially jumpers/cardigans and coats are clearly labelled. Please help your child to learn how to put on and take off their own jumper/cardigan and coat independently. Thank you.

 

Weekly Topic Focus

At the start of each week, a Topic Focus will be posted at the bottom of our class page giving details of what we are learning at school and suggestions of things you can do at home. It will also contain any dates, information or reminders that you need to be aware of. In addition to this, don’t forget to check your child’s book bag every day for letters, pictures and information.

 

Dates for your diary

Fri 2nd Feb: Whole School Mass – Candlemas

Fri 9th Feb:   YR visit to Codsall Library

w/c 12th Feb:   Half Term holiday

Fri 1st March:   Whole School Mass – St David’s Day

Thurs 7th March:       World Book Day

Wed 13th March:       YR trip to the Safari Park (please don’t tell children – it’s a surprise!)

Fri 15th March:   Whole School Mass – St Patrick’s Day

w/c 18th March:  Holy Week

Fri 22nd March:   Last day of term – Whole School Mass

 

We will update this webpage with news, dates and other information so please check it out regularly. If you have any questions feel free to email on:

[email protected]

We look forward to the next part of our learning journey together.

Mrs Poole & the YR team

xx

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