Reception 2022 - 2023

Welcome to Reception 2022-2023

We warmly welcome you and your child to Reception and hope that you will find this class page useful throughout the year. We will regularly update the page with notices of forthcoming events and general messages. It will also include the areas of learning that we will be covering and activities that you might want to try at home to help support your child's learning. 

Summer Term 1

Welcome back! We hope you've had a lovely Easter break. We have a very exciting and busy few weeks ahead, packed with learning opportunities and activities based upon the interests of the children. We will be learning about Eid and celebrating the King's Coronation. The children are looking forward to attending Forest school each Wednesday afternoon. They will be learning basic camp safety rules, cooking on the camp fire, caring for the chickens, completing scavenger hunts, toasting marshmallows and helping with the kitchen garden. The children have chosen to change our role play area from a 'Doctor's surgery' into a 'cafe.' We hope to visit a local cafe as research for our own! 

'Foodie Friday' continues to be one of the children's favourite parts of the week. Over the coming weeks, the children will be making jam sandwiches, vegan jelly, pizza and smoothies.

Identity Box We will continue to send the Identity Boxes home with children each week until everyone has had a turn. Please help your child to fill the box with items which represent and reflect their identity and send it back in after the weekend. This is a lovely opportunity for the children to share and talk about things that are special to them. 

Story and Knowledge Boxes We hope that those who have had the boxes so far have enjoyed sharing the lovely books along with the treats inside. Please support your child with their illustration/fact after reading the information book. We would love to see photos of your children reading these books at home and tell us any comments they make about what they've read (speech bubbles included in boxes). 

Maths

Maths is everywhere in our classroom inside and outside! We love to explore patterns in our environment and create our own number challenges through the day.

• The children are focusing now on patterns beyond 10. Count on and back beyond 10 together using real objects when you can. Snakes and ladders is a great maths game for this.
• Keep encouraging your child to see smaller groups within a larger number. Ideas to do this could be having two places to sort toys or arrange items onto three shelves. Play hiding games with a number of objects in a box, under a cloth, in a tent or in a cave. Do they know how many are hidden? 

Phonics

We continue to follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonic scheme of work.

This term we start Phase 4 and will be reading and spelling longer words e.g. lightning, torches, chatting and also compound words and words ending in -ing, -ed, -est. The children will be writing phrases and sentences daily. We will be teaching new tricky words - said, like, so, have, some, come, love, do, were, here, little, says, out, today, there, when, what, one.

Please continue to read with your child each day and practise reading the tricky words on the coloured cards. It is so important that they practise the skills we teach during phonic and reading sessions - this greatly supports them to make good progress.

There are lots of fun phonic games online that are free and can also support learning. Some of the ones we use in school include PhonicsBloom, Phonics Play and Top Marks phonics.

RE

The question we will be investigating this half-term is 'What makes a good friend?' The children will explore 'friendship' and why friendships are important. They will learn more about Jesus' special friends through stories and discuss how Christians are friends of Jesus. 

Our Favourite Five

Books are at the centre of everything we do. We love books in Reception!  Each half-term we will focus on five different texts to get to know them really well. We will read them many times together and act them out with story props. Also we will use story maps to help retell the story. Throughout the year, via this page, we will show you the story maps so you can retell them at home too.

Here are 'Our Favourite Five' books for this half term :-                          

Open Door Policy

We love to communicate with YOU the parent. If you have any worries or questions please come and talk to us at the door, at drop off or collection time. Also we have a class email address that you can contact us on directly:

https://outlook.office.com/mail/kingfishershomelearning@chesterbluecoatce.cheshire.sch.uk/  - This is the email address if your child is in the Kingfisher class (Mrs Millington & Mrs Williams).

https://outlook.office.com/mail/robinshomelearning@chesterbluecoatce.cheshire.sch.uk/ - This is the email address if your child is in the Robin's class (Mrs White).

Many thanks for your continued support. 

The Reception Team