Reception
Welcome to Reception
Mrs Gates, Miss Shaw and Miss Parveen work in Reception
Autumn Term 2023
English
This half term our English sessions will be focused on speaking and listening skills and joining in with stories and rhymes. We will be initially focusing on the key text ‘A New House for Mouse’ by Petr Horacek as the stimulus for our learning, followed by ‘Owl Babies’ later in the half term. We will be following the journey of the main character, Mouse, and investigating how she can solve the problem within the story. We will be using this text to develop our own viewpoints and ideas, and practise sharing our ideas with others. We will be focusing on developing our vocabulary and listening skills by asking questions of others and working hard to take turns when speaking and listening to other people’s ideas.
Later in the term we will be exploring the key text "Handa's Surprise" and delving deeper into the questions of who, what and where to develop our understanding of characters, settings and the sequence of events.
Phonics
At Godley we follow the Monster Phonics scheme of learning for introducing letters and sounds. This half term we will be introducing the children to Phase 2 phonics and learning letter sounds for most letters of the alphabet. We will be learning to recognise the letters by sight and sound and we will be also learning the correct letter formations. This will enable the children to learn to read, write and spell short words containing these sounds, which we call CVC words, later in the term. We will also be encouraging the children to recognise familiar words such as their own name, and familiar symbols and logos. We will be engaging in small group guided reading sessions to develop the children’s understanding and comprehension of different stories and books and working in groups on specific phonic activities.
Later in the term we will be learning about the remaining letters of the alphabet and how two letters can be combined to make new sounds: digraphs! We will continue to develop our blending and segmenting skills to begin reading and writing simple words and captions.
Maths
This term we will be developing our understanding of numbers and what they represent. We will be focusing on the concepts of matching and sorting, more and less and developing our understanding of the numbers 1, 2 and 3. We will be practising representing numbers in different ways, exploring how numbers 1, 2 and 3 are composed and looking for how numbers are used within the environment. We will be developing our understanding of patterns and making comparisons between size, mass and capacity. We will also be thinking about which numbers are important to us and why!
Later in the term we will be deepening our understanding of numbers up to 5, thinking about how they can be represented and how we can make them using other numbers too! We will be considering the sequence of numbers and looking carefully at the special order of numbers, using a range of resources to find one more and one less. On a daily basis, we will be exploring time by looking at the clock, measuring time using different equipment and thinking about different measurements of time, such as days of the week, months of the year and different times of the day eg. morning and afternoon.
Theme
We will be using our key text as a stimulus to explore and share about our own lives and the lives of others, including places we live, foods we like to eat and our favourite animals. Our Geography sessions will focus on where we live, our school environment and the immediate surroundings of our school. Our Science sessions will focus on investigating woodland creatures and their habitats, exploring the concept of nocturnal animals and thinking about seasonal change too!
Later in the term we will be focusing on History and thinking about ourselves and the people in our lives. We will be looking at our family members and creating family trees, and also beginning to investigate timelines. We will be talking about the special events in our lives and ordering and sequencing them. In Science we will be continuing to look at animals, including animals that hibernate and the differences between animals in our local area and in the savannah.
Websites
Nursery rhymes to sing and watch https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06kbsbz
Counting games https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/3-5-years/counting
Listening to sounds https://www.phonicsbloom.com/uk/game/list/phonics-games-phase-1
Letter formation http://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/skyWriter/index.html
Shape recognition https://www.topmarks.co.uk/early-years/shape-monsters
Stories to listen to https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories