Welcome to Reception!

Hello and welcome to St Mary's and our class page. I will update this page with news about our learning and any important information that you may need to know. My name is Miss Matthews and your Teaching Assistant is called Mrs Powell. Some of you will be returning to St Mary's to continue your journey but for many of you this will be your first week at a brand new school with brand new faces! We are so excited to finally meet all of you and start our journey together!

The first few weeks in Reception will be all about building positive relationships with teachers and peers and getting to know one another. We will gradually introduce the Reception routine, explore the provision and discuss how we access this independently. We will then begin to gather baseline assessments on each child to ensure that we know how to plan effectively for their next steps in learning. 

Topic

Our topic for the first half term will be 'All About Me'. During this time we will look at ourselves, finding out about what makes us special, what we like and don't like, our birthdays, our families and where we live. We will share story books such as 'The Three Little Pigs' and 'The Bear with sticky paws goes to School'. We will enhance provision linked to ourselves and our families for example babies in the water, construction to build our houses etc. 

We will then be moving on to looking at the people who help us both in and outside of school. During this time we will explore our school environment and think about the different people who help us in school. 

The First Week Back 

As you are aware we will be staggering the children in as per the letter that you received in the summer term. Some of the children will start on Wednesday and some will start on Thursday or Friday. The week commencing Monday 7th September all children will be in full time school.     

Tapestry 

During the first week we will hand you a letter about our online learning journey 'Tapestry'. We ask you to complete the form and return it to ourselves so that you are able to access your child's learning journey. We use Tapestry as well as paper learning journeys to record observations of your child. We also use Tapestry for parental observations and other forms of communication from school to home. 

We hope you have all had a magnificent summer and are as excited as we are to welcome you into Reception.