Welcome to the Proud Peacock Reception Class 

I am Mrs Stapleton, the class teacher, and am supported by my great team of Mrs Britton, Miss Cook, Mrs Ellis and Miss Harrington-Groves.

Our special class mascots are Penny and Parker who help us on our learning journey and are always watching carefully for children following our school rules of Be Kind, Be Safe, Be Responsible. They both like to have weekend adventures and enjoy visiting the children's homes to have lots fun and meet with their families to discover more about them. 

Please see the attached welcome pack which gives you an introduction of what your child needs as they begin their journey in Reception and also key information about our class.   Our main platform for communication is Class Dojo which we use for notices and messages between home and school. We also use Tapestry as an online learning journal where we will share photos of what your child is learning in school and we encourage you to also contribute with their key moments from home also.  The children love to share their pictures on the big screen and we enjoy seeing them applying their learning at home and also participating in experiences we can't always offer in school.  If you have any issues setting up either of these accounts please do get in contact. 

Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Curriculum

The Reception year is the final year of the EYFS curriculum which spans across 7 areas of learning along with developing positive characteristics of effective learning. The areas are:  

Personal Social Emotional Development, Communication and Language, Physical Development, Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World

and Expressive Arts and Design. 

Learning through PLAY is still a crucial part of our curriculum and we aim to balance this with our discrete sessions to secure firm foundations for the children to build upon and be ready to join KS1.

The children will be measured at the end of the year against 17 Early Learning Goals (ELG's) where the 7 areas of learning are refined into further sub-areas which assess if your child is working towards or working at the expected level for their age. Please see the following document which goes into further detail on each one.   

Autumn Term

Our initial priority is to welcome you all to our class and ensure that we settle all the children so they are happy and comfortable to be ready to thrive at school.  We spend time getting to know the children and establishing the rules and routines of our class environment before exploring the wider school.  Within this 'getting to know you' period we will complete our baseline assessments to gauge where the children are developmentally so we can establish the children's starting points to progress and flourish from. 

We will introduce our discrete Literacy and Maths learning sessions through our Read, Write, Inc. Phonics and White Rose Maths programmes this term. I will host parental information sessions with a focus on these so you can understand and best support your child at home also.  The children will also receive homework activities and reading books linked to these also. 

The other focusses for our learning this term will be through topics such as Family, Autumn, Celebrations and Night and Day.  

Forest Fun Sessions will happen on Wellie Wednesday, where the children will need a pair of wellies and PE will take place on a Friday, please send in the basic PE kit of t-shirt, shorts and plimsolls to begin with to make it easier for the children to be independent.  

PLEASE NAME EVERYTHING that you send into school so we can best help the children keep track and be responsible for their own belongings. 

Reception Baseline Assessment

The Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) is a statutory assessment that we complete within the first six weeks of your child starting school.  It is an interactive and practical assessment with an adult within the class where the children complete activities measuring their early literacy, communication, language and mathematics skills.  The purpose of the assessment is to provide a starting point for a new measure that will help parents understand how well schools support their pupils to progress between Reception and Year 6. Please see attached document for further information. 

As a school we use the RBA assessment alongside other play based activities to establish a baseline judgement across all seven areas of the EYFS curriculum which we can then use to best tailor our provision and learning opportunities to your child's stage of development. 

Please don't hesitate to get in contact if you have any questions or if you are unsure of anything especially if it is your first child starting school or you are new to our school community.  

In the Spring Term, we built on our learning from the Autumn Term.  We launched into Winter and enjoyed a winter walk around our woodland area.  We learnt about animals that hibernate in the winter and made bird feeders for those looking for food.  We investigated the effects of cold and had a go at freezing water and worked out where it would melt the quickest.  In PSED we talked about differences and, just like a snowflake, we talked about how unique we each are.  In maths, we are continuing our number work learning about amounts that make a number, finding one more and one less than an amount and different shapes in our environment. 

We have had a wonderful week celebrating Chinese New Year, culminating in a performance to our parents where we performed a Dragon dance, acted out the story and recited poems that we had learnt off by heart.

We moved onto Traditional Tales and became story tellers ourselves with actions!  We started with one of our favourite stories: The Gingerbread Man where we linked our learning around the story.  We made gingerbread biscuits and even observed what would happen if he tried to swim in the river by putting a biscuit in water.  He wouldn't last long!  We had a go at writing our own stories and changed the ending and used the computer to design our own Gingerbread man.  We then followed the children's interests in building and delved into the story of the Three Little Pigs.  We became fabulous story tellers and made up or own versions based on the same story structure but using different animals.  We enjoyed playing in the garden building in our construction site!

Before we finished the term by learning about Easter celebrations, we compared where we live to life in Kenya where we read Handa's Surprise.  We have enjoyed trying different fruits from Africa and finding out about some of the animals that live in the Savannah. We have been diligent travel agents and written brochures advertising Kenya as a place to visit.  We wish we could go there!

What a busy term we've had!    

Summer Term

We will spring back to school into our first topic: Spring!  We will be off on adventures in our woodland area searching for signs of spring and then work together to create group poems about spring.  The children will have lots of opportunity to explore different artistic techniques to represent spring flowers.  We will then move onto St George's day and Dragons where we will learn the story of Zog and include what he would learn if he came for a visit to our class!  

Next, we will move onto our Growing topic where we will set up our own mini farm and plant various vegetables.  We will also be finding out about different animals that live on the farm.  We can't wait for our visit to a farm to meet the farmers!  We will be learning about healthy living and what we can do to keep ourselves fit as fiddles!

As we approach the end of term, we will be thinking about growing up as prepare for our next stage at Harwich Community.  We will move on to find out about jobs in our community and hopefully invite people in to talk about their different occupations.     

P.E

We are lucky to have Will from Tiny Rugby teaching us rugby on Monday afternoons.  Please ensure earrings are removed and long hair tied back.