Welcome to Reception

Autumn 1 2025

Dear Parents,

Welcome to Reception!  We hope you have all had a lovely summer holiday with your children.

This half term the children will be introduced to our school values of Respect, Good Manners, Patience, Perseverance and Honesty and will earn dojo points for good behaviour, attitudes and effort.  When your child models a super learning attitude, they will be placed on the golden crown.  If they stay on it for the rest of the week, they earn an extra 10 dojos. 

Attendance

Regular attendance helps your child build good habits, getting them used to the idea of getting up and ready for learning each day.  It helps your child build and sustain relationships with staff and make friends.  It can also help to ensure continuity of learning, with staff being more easily able to assess your child’s progress and identify next steps for them in accessing the curriculum.

Every moment in school counts, and days missed add up quickly. The higher a pupil’s attendance, the more they are likely to learn, and the better they are likely to perform as they progress through school. 

Staffing in Reception is:

Mrs May - Class Teacher 

Mrs Begum – Teaching Tuesdays and Thursdays

Mrs Patel – Teaching Assistant

Miss Read - Special Support Assistant

Homework

Please complete all homework which is set on a Friday and return completed books to school by the following Wednesday. Your child will have a timetable of homework activities, reading books and knowledge organisers to share with you each term.  The knowledge organiser suggests activities for discussion to support your child’s communication and language skills.

You can find links to useful websites in the websites star on the Brookhouse website.

Parental support at home is vital in helping your child to progress.

PE

PE will be on a Tuesday morning so please make sure your child comes to school in their full P.E kit.  Please also ensure that earrings are removed on this day and long hair is tied up. The correct PE uniform is: yellow PE shirt, school green sweatshirt/cardigan, black PE shorts or jogging bottoms and black pumps or trainers.

Our topic this half term is ‘This is Me’

Communication and Language

We are focusing on how to listen carefully and why listening is important. We will engage in story times, learn new vocabulary and listen carefully to rhymes and songs, paying attention to how they sound.  Through conversations with adults and peers throughout the day, we will develop social phrases to help us communicate better.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

Our main focus is to manage our own needs and to identify how we are feeling.  We will be working on independently going to the toilet, washing our hands, putting on our coat and organising our belongings.  We will learn to wait our turn patiently, to take turns and to tidy up.  We will also talk about our families, our likes and dislikes.

Physical Development

We will continue to develop our fundamental movement skills of rolling, crawling, walking, jumping, running, hopping, skipping and climbing.  We do this by having daily access to the outdoors and also during our weekly PE sessions. We will develop and use our core muscle strength to achieve good posture and will also develop skills needed to manage the school day successfully, such as lining up, meal times and personal hygiene.

Literacy

Our focus for this half term is to be able to read individual letters by saying the sounds for them.  We will also blend these sounds into words so that we can begin to read short words.  We will learn how to write the grapheme (letter) for each of these sounds ensuring we write them correctly.

Maths

For our daily maths, we will be matching numbers and patterns focusing on what is the same and what is different.  We will then move on to sorting objects by noticing similarities and differences.  This will support your child when we move on to comparing and ordering objects.  We will also be spotting patterns around the environment; on different materials and on objects.  In order to have a deep understanding of numbers up to 5, counting and comparing numbers of objects will be throughout the day.

Understanding the World

During dedicated talk time, we will discuss how we are all different, special and unique.  We will discuss our families and people who are familiar to us and discuss how there are many different families.  During this half term, our pupils will be given opportunities to compare and discuss how Blackburn has changed e.g. looking at images to show what Blackburn was like when their grandparents or parents were children compared to now. We will also be exploring and organising images or events using basic chronology e.g. Blackburn when grandparents were children; parents were children; and now.

Expressive Arts and Design

During singing practice and within the classroom environment, we will be introduced to a range of music across the world.  We will listen carefully, move to and talk about how music makes us feel.  We will also sing songs and rhymes to help us to match the pitch.  In addition, we will use a wide range of resources to represent our ideas and to create individual pieces of work at the same time being able to name the primary colours red, yellow and blue.

We hope your child has an amazing first half term being the best that they can be. 

Stay healthy, safe and happy! 

From all the Reception team: Mrs May, Mrs Begum, Mrs Patel and Mrs Read