Welcome

Welcome to the Reception page!

The Reception Classes this year are Sunshine, Rainbow and Moonbeam.

Our curriculum follows the Early Years Foundation Stage, which consists of several different areas of learning. The Core Areas include: Communication and Language, Physical Development, PSED (Personal, Social and Emotional Development). We also focus on Literacy (Reading and Writing), Mathematics, Understanding of the World and Expressive Arts and Design. 

The children have had a memorable year so far - we have been busy playing, exploring and building friendships. We are lucky to have our own newly-refurbished Early Years playground where much of our learning takes place. 

Core Areas

Communication and language 

The children have developed their listening skills through carpet games and story time. We also began to use talk partners during carpet time to further develop the children's listening and speaking skills. Opportunities to develop speech and language are woven into the day, and the children are exposed to high quality language and vocabulary in the environment. Each class has a Role Play Area which is refreshed regularly. Children are able to dress up and use their imaginations in their play. This is an important part of their development as it encourages turn-taking, listening to each other and understanding and respecting different perspectives.

We have been exploring storytelling by learning and retelling familiar stories. This is through the use of puppets and masks as well as memorising high quality texts with actions to support them.

Physical Development

In Reception, we always enjoy being active, whether it is on a bike, climbing around the playground or just running around with our friends. We have been making the most of our new climbing frame and trim trail in the playground, working on our balance skills and strength as we climb. We have also been developing our Fine and Gross motor skills - each classroom has a Finger Gym set up with different activities every day!

PSED

The children have enjoyed settling into their routines and making new friends. We have been reading 'The Colour Monster' by Anna Llenas to help children understand their emotions. In each classroom, we have set up an area for children to identify their feelings using the different colours in the book, for example yellow when they are feeling happy and green when they are feeling calm.

We have also discussed different strategies to help us keep calm, creating toolkits to enable us to manage our feelings. We have incorporated mindfulness into the classroom, offering opportunities to engage in mindful breathing and mindful colouring in the 'Calm Corner'. A favourite book which helps us with our mindfulness is 'The Worry Tiger' by Alexandra Page, a story teaching us strategies to manage feelings of anxiety.

We have also read the book 'Have you filled your bucket today' by Carol McCloud and talked about how acts of kindness can keep everyone's buckets full. Each class also created a friendship potion, identifying the key ingredients needed when making new friends.

Reading

Reading is a huge part of life at Bessemer. We thread a variety of high quality texts into every part of the curriculum, and read one-to-one in school with all our children. 

We also teach Phonics daily in Reception, and the environment is full opportunities for the children to recognise the sounds and common exception words they are learning.

Each classroom has an inviting Reading Area, full of a diverse range of texts. We also read a story at Goodbye Time every day and visit the local library regularly, encouraging Reading for Pleasure in the children.

Autumn 2

Literacy

Our topic this term is 'Space', so it's only right that we explore space in our texts in literacy! Our first text is a favourite of the children - 'The Way Back Home' by Oliver Jeffers. We talked about asking questions, and have also been role playing in the characters of 'The Boy' and 'The Martian'. We have been working on our sequencing skills, sorting different parts of the story into order.

Our next text is 'Look Up' by Nathan Bryon, all about a girl called Rocket who loves space and is always trying to encourage her brother Jamal to look up from his phone and at the sky. The children are enjoying creating a factfile about the moon, the sun, Earth and other planets to teach Jamal some of what they had learnt.

We are also studying Julia Donaldson's 'The Smeds and The Smoos', inventing and describing our own planets in the process.

In Phonics, we have started learning some phase 3 digraphs, such as 'ai' in rain and 'ee' in sheep.

Maths

During Autumn 2, we have progressed to representing, comparing and making the numbers 1, 2 and 3. We know that 3 is made of 1 and 2, and we can also make 3 from 0 and 3! We have also started talking about the numbers 4 and 5. 

The children have been familiarising themselves with different amounts, and identifying amounts with more or less. They have also been finding 1 more and 1 less.

We have also started learning about 2-D shapes, starting with circles and triangles, before moving onto four-sided shapes such as squares and oblongs. The children are recognising and describing these different shapes, for example they know a square has four equal sides, whereas an oblong will have two longer and two shorter sides.

Finally, we have been talking about time. We know the differences between night and day, mornings and afternoons and have started ordering our days into a timeline.

Understanding of the World

Autumn 2’s topic is Space. The children absolutely loved learning about the different planets in the solar system, and have learnt a variety of songs to help them remember their facts. We made our very own planets using balloons and paper mache, and designed and built our own rockets which even took us to 'The Moon'!

We have also been observing changes in the environment outside, noticing the seasons moving onto Autumn. We have been out to our Nature Garden and looking for signs of autumn. We have also collected autumn leaves to use in our artwork.

We have discovered more about different celebrations around the world. We learnt all about Diwali, and made our own Diwa lamps. We also learnt about the Christmas story, and have heard about Hanukkah and how it is celebrated. We had a go at making our own dreidels to spin.

Expressive Arts and Design

This term, we have been building on our creative skills. To celebrate Bonfire Night, we used our printing skills to create pictures of fireworks. We also made our very own autumn trees, using leaf rubbing to create leaves. The children have enjoyed making paper mache planets and their own rockets from junk modelling. We have also created space ships, astronaut helmets and even alien masks to act out our favourite stories about space!

In music, we have learnt about the concepts of making music fast, slowly, loudly and quietly. 

We had lots of fun learning all about the Christmas story, and performed our own Christmas play. We enjoyed singing our festive tunes, dressed up in character and improved our oracy skills while speaking our lines on stage to an audience full of our adults.

To build upon our painting skills, we learnt about the Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh, and created our own beautiful 'Starry Night' paintings, using big brushstrokes just like the artist.

Autumn 1

Literacy

We started the year with some of our favourite texts, including 'Who Are You', 'Postie Bear' and 'Family and Me!'

We have been developing our skills in listening and response, sequencing, writing lists and drawing representations of ourselves and our families.

Each classroom and the outdoor area have plenty of opportunities for mark making and early writing, such as making shopping lists in our role play area, and writing sounds and words in chalk in the playground. In the Autumn term, we have been mastering recognising and writing our own names, and begun writing simple words and captions.

In Phonics, we have begun to recognise phase 2 sounds. We have started to blend them together to read short CVC words, such as 'sit', 'tap' and 'cat'.

Maths

We started the year by exploring matching and sorting by amounts, size, colour and shape. We practised doing our sorting in the provision using colourful animals, pom poms and buttons. The children also enjoyed matching different objects such as socks!

We have introduced the concepts of size, height, length, weight and capacity, discussing key vocabulary such as lighter, heavier, empty, half full and full. We have used the skills we have learnt in the provision, making towers of bricks and making sure our teddy bear picnics have the right size plates for the bears.

We have begun to master numbers 1-3. We're also learning about repeating patterns and have made some of our own.

Understanding of the world

This half term's topic was 'All About Me'. This was the perfect topic to start the year as we were all getting to know one another. We talked about different celebrations we all enjoy, and even hosted a birthday party for our class puppets. This topic developed the children's understanding that we all have similarities and differences, teaching them to voice their interests and discover new things. We have also been thinking about how we grow, comparing ourselves to younger and older siblings. 

For this area of learning we have been exploring and working on our exploration and observational skills.  We have particularly enjoyed playing with the dinosaurs in the small world areas and thinking about the past. Outside, the soil digging area has proved very popular and we have found a variety of invertebrates hiding under the logs, including a stag beetle! 

We have used a variety of containers and measuring jugs to explore in the water.  The bench on our outside obstacle course has provided a great ramp to race cars down. The changing seasons have provided us with many opportunities for noticing and discussing change, starting with Autumn. We have been exploring outside looking for the signs of Autumn, such as the changing colours of the leaves.

We are fortunate to have access to both the school's Nature Garden and our own flowerbeds in the playground, and we have been able to plant bulbs in the Autumn term. 

This term we have also been thinking about roles within the community. We were lucky to receive visits from our local firefighters, a midwife, a social worker, a detective and a dentist who taught us all about their day-to-day roles and how they can help us.

Expressive Arts and Design 

We have been looking closely at our features and making our own self-portraits. Our classroom role play areas have been very popular with children acting out different scenarios based on their own experiences.

Outside, the children have enjoyed acting out stories at the puppet show.  Some reception children have created their own racing car using the large construction materials. 

The children have taken a keen interest in pirates, especially since the unveiling of our new ship in the Early Years playground, and have been using our construction resources outside to build their own pirate ships. We have also been designing our own flags and pirate hats, and making maps to hunt for hidden treasure.