Welcome to Reception
We create calm, inviting and engaging learning environments, carefully designed to meet the needs of our children at each new stage of their learning journey.

We take inspiration from the ‘Reggio Emilia’ approach, providing rich and stimulating learning environments. Our spaces are light and neutral to allow the children’s creations to take centre stage.

Resources are natural and open-ended to promote creativity and allow them to be used in a range of purposeful ways. Staff carefully plan each area to ensure that the resources promote endless learning opportunities.

Child Led Learning

Free flow learning sessions make up the largest part of a child’s day.  These sessions are child led to ensure each and every child reaches their full potential in a fun, engaging and relevant way that is personalised to them.  

Child led learning ensures all children are motivated to learn and show high levels of involvement and engagement.  Learning in this way provides children with the time to explore, investigate, and experiment. They problem solve and work out things out for themselves, which develops deeper understanding of their learning processes.  

Parents and carers are crucial in supporting staff to identify areas of interest for each child and in supporting their next steps, by completing activities at home.  

Outdoor Learning 

Our children have access to the outdoor area throughout the whole day.  The benefits to learning outdoors are huge and provide children with a wide range of opportunities to collaborate, problem solve, take risks and make links between their ideas.  We play outside in all weathers. It would be beneficial if your child has a pair of wellies and a waterproof coat or puddle suit to wear on wet days.  These can also be kept in school. 

Tapestry - Individual Online Learning Journals 

We encourage regular dialogue between home and school on Tapestry so we can support each other in ensuring each child reaches their full potential. 

Staff will regularly post pictures, videos and comments about a child’s learning in school.  There will be next steps and home learning challenges for children to complete at home.  

Please support your child by completing these activities and posting pictures and comments to show this.  We love to see all of the family activities you are doing at home and spend time in school looking through these with your child.  They provide a lovely starting point for valuable conversations about their home lives and ideas for staff to plan new resources to support what you are doing at home, when they are at school. 

The Early Years Curriculum 

Our curriculum is broad and has 7 Areas of Learning.  These are split into Prime and Specific Areas 

Prime Areas of Learning

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development
• Physical Development
• Communication and Language

Specific Areas of Learning

• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the World
• Expressive Arts and Design

Reading/ Home Activities
Reading helps children access all areas of learning so we would ask that you read with your child for 5 to 10 minutes daily – or as close to this as possible as we completely appreciate that sometimes life is busy and the children are tired. We would also encourage you to read stories to your child and share books with them. Children will visit the school library bi-weekly, this helps to promote reading for pleasure. Children will choose stories to take home after each library visit to read at home. These need to be returned before the next visit. Your child will be given a reading record and reading books will be sent home on a Friday, these need to be returned by the following Thursday.  Your support in extending your child’s learning outside of school is really valued.  This could be as simple as discussing the colour of leaves in autumn to looking at house numbers when out for a walk. Try to make learning informal and part of everyday life.  We love to hear about learning at home and encourage you to post on Tapestry and bring into school anything you wish to add to your child’s learning journey book.

PE
Your child will have weekly PE lessons, on Thursdays.

Useful websites for Parents

Please find a list of websites that you may find useful in helping you and your child to learn about phonics. Games and fun activity websites are also included:

Home reading - Ruth Miskin Phonics Training - Information and resources to support phonics learning at home

www.ictgames.co.uk/literacy.html- fun games for the children to play

First School Years - Free Worksheets and Resources - fun games for the children to play

BBC Bitesize - many games to play covering all areas of the curriculum

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/read-write-inc-phonics-guide/

 - Information and resources to support phonics learning at home

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/ fun free games for the children to play

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/numberblocks fun programmes to reinforce learning about numbers

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/Search.aspx?Subject=16&AgeGroup=1 fun free games for the children to play

How to pronounce sounds

A useful video demonstrating how to pronounce sounds correctly.