Starting school is an important and exciting time for children and their families. We strive to ensure every child settles quickly so we can work together to ensure children make good or better progress from their starting points. We offer a well-resourced play-based environment and have a team of adults working to support  and challenge children in all areas of their development.

Transition information

Miss Lucy Crouch - Foundation Stage Team Leader

Learning in Reception

In Reception we aim to support the children to be lifelong learners, something we strive to do by developing their characteristics of effective learning, i.e. exploring new experiences, being creative in their thinking, using what they know and building resilience and perseverance. We do this through a play- based curriculum that focuses on developing the children’s knowledge and understanding through their interests. You will find us outside in all weathers (we provide full waterproofs!) be it working together collaboratively on a large scale, exploring the garden or building dens.

We come together in small or large groups throughout the day for teacher led learning times. This is one opportunity where our teaching can build on what the children have been doing and introduce new skills and concepts for them to take back into their play.  We start our afternoons each day with our daily ‘magic maths’ session.

Developing children’s language and communication skills and the teaching of reading are both a central part  of each child’s reception year. We begin the year with on focus on immersing the children in reading experiences; ensuring they have a love of reading from the beginning. From early on we have a daily phonics session before lunch.

Our aims for the teaching of phonics are as follows:

• Teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) at a quick pace (around one a day)
• Immediately teach how to blend sounds into complete words for reading, e.g. the phonemes /c/ /a/ /t/ blend together to make the word “cat”.
• Immediately teach how to segment words into their individual phonemes for writing, e.g. the word “bus” segments into the phonemes /b/ /u/ /s/.
• Teach key irregular words (tricky words), noting which parts of the word can be blended phonetically and which are irregular, e.g. “I”, “me” and “we”.
• Use decodable texts to ensure that children apply phonics knowledge to read at an age appropriate level. 
• Apply phonics skills to writing activities across the curriculum.

All Reception children are able to enjoy a hot school dinner and the Reception staff continue to support children during lunch time to ensure that this too is a learning experience for them.

We very much value the wealth of knowledge you have about your child as a learner and will meet with you five times throughout the year to discuss your child’s learning and plan next steps for them, to ensure all children make good progress.

EYFS Statutory Framework

Development Matters