Welcome to Reception!

Miss Fletcher-Jones is the class teacher and Mrs Smith, Mrs Bardwell and Mrs Racher are the teaching assistants across Year R and KS1. On this page you will find information about Reception class news, pictures of things we've done and more.

Early Years

To find out more about Early Years at St Luke's, please visit our Early Years page.

Reminders

Arrival and Collection Times

All children should enter and leave school via the external Year R door.

All children should arrive between 8.45am – 8.55am.  

All children should be collected at 3.20pm. 

Breakfast Club & After School Club -  Children in Year R, 1 to 6 in Breakfast Club should arrive as normal and be taken to the Breakfast Club room. They will be taken to their Classroom ready for lessons. Breakfast Club will be open from 7.45am. After School Club will be open until 5.45pm. 

Stationery

We will provide this equipment where required.

P.E. 

Children in Class R will need to ensure that their P.E. Kit is in school from the start of the term. It will be sent home for washing at the end of each half term. P.E. Kits should consist of jogging bottoms, shorts, a house-coloured t-shirt, jumper and trainers.

Maths

As a school we use Maths No Problem and in Reception we also incorporate the Early Years Number Sense programme into daily Maths sessions. The table below highlights the topics that we will be covering in Year R in the Autumn term:

Phonics

In the Autumn term, the children will be learning phase 2 graphemes and tricky words in their phonics lessons, using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Phonics scheme. At your home visit, you will have been given an overview of what sounds are being learnt each week and a copy of the tricky words. To find out more about how we teach phonics, please visit our phonics page https://www.st-lukes.hants.sch.uk/phonics/.

Our Class Country

We will be learning all about England. We will investigate where it is in the world and find out facts about England.

Our Classroom Environment

Through our engaging and stimulating classroom environment, children have lots of opportunities to play, explore, learn actively, create and think critically. This area of the blog will be updated with photos as the term progresses.

2024 - 2025

The children have thoroughly enjoyed their vegetable garden and should be really proud of their achievements! We sowed pea, been, courgette, spinach, beetroot seeds and more and planted out the seedlings when they were big enough. It has been wonderful watching our vegetable garden grow and all of the children have made sure the plants are watered every day. It has provided us with a permanent source of snacks - the children happily pick and eat the mangetout, beans and spinach leaves and munch on them! But most exciting of all was making garlic fried courgettes and courgette and cheese fritters. Every child in Reception tasted them and they were delicious!

Holiday Day!

I am excited to share with you the wonderful experiences we had during our 'Holiday Day' where we explored three different countries: France, Spain and the Bahamas! We embarked on a city break to Paris where the children enjoyed learning about famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and indulged in delicious croissants. They practiced their French greetings and had a lovely time writing postcards, colouring flags and experiencing French cafe culture! Next, we took a short haul flight south to Madrid. The vibrant culture caught the children's imaginations as they made castanets, danced the Flamenco and savoured a taste of traditional tapas. Finally, we set off on a long haul adventure to the Bahamas where the children paddled in the sea, drank cocktails, ate watermelon and wore flower garlands. They particularly enjoyed learning about the swimming pigs! Throughout our day, the children experienced what it’s like to wait in queues, whether at passport control or the gate, and they even got a taste of inflight snacks and entertainment. We made it a point to discuss the importance of safety talks before take-off and landing and the excitement of having their passports stamped. Even when we encountered a 'flight delay', the children handled it with wonderful patience and, whilst waiting in the airport lounge, enjoyed sharing with their friends the toys and games that they had packed.

It was a fantastic opportunity for them to explore the world from the classroom and we all had a fabulous, but slightly exhausting, day!

On a welly walk, the children discovered some 'mushrooms.' We talked about toadstools and mushrooms and they were introduced to the word funghi.  We also talked about the dangers of touching funghi.  After that, we put our Maths skills of matching and comparing to the test and played a game of leaf snap!  The children gathered some different leaves then played the game with a partner, looking for how their leaves were the same.  Some matched in colour whilst others matched in shape.

Creating leaf creatures!  Friday 11th October

After sharing the book Leaf Man by Lois Elhert, the children had a go at making some of their own leaf creatures.

This week, the children have enjoyed making lego marble mazes, playdough robots, shape rockets and pipe cleaner mermaid dolls!  They have also played games including snakes and ladders and flip/show/build.

This week has felt very Christmassy! The children have enjoyed making paper chains and decorating the class Christmas tree. They have raced wind up Christmas characters, made salt dough hanging decorations (drying and ready to paint next week!), fed the reindeer carrots by rolling a dice to see how many, had a go at wrapping presents and played with the Winter Wonderland small world.

Our Heartsmart principle this half term is 'Too much selfie isn't healthy.' We have been talking about how we can recognise how other people are feeling. The children were able to identify when children in photographs were experiencing a good or bad feeling and many of the children were able to use different words to describe feelings beyond 'sad' and 'happy' eg miserable, mad, lonely, angry.

The Reception have had a wonderful half term exploring 'All Creatures Great and Small.' From dinosaurs to minibeasts, birds and reptiles to wild animals and pets, they have had lots of fun learning in many different ways. Some of the highlights included making bird feeders, holding an ostrich egg, discovering dinosaurs eggs, controlling Beebots, painting butterflies and role-playing in the dinosaur museum!

This week the children have been exploring patterns. They have created their own patterns and learnt about units of repeat. Many of the children are able to describe patterns, for example, AB or ABC patterns where 2 or 3 things are repeated. They know that patterns can be made using objects but also actions and sounds.

The children thoroughly enjoyed this topic! We had lots of fun making and eating marmalade sandwiches, playing in the role-play bakery or with the London small world and learning all about famous London landmarks.

We have had a really, lovely first day back after the Easter holidays and a brilliant start to our new theme 'Growing in the garden.' After talking about the things that we have growing in our own gardens, we explored the school grounds, looking for things that grow. We found lots including buttercups, rhubarb, bluebells, fennel and even some wild garlic that we are looking forward to using in our mud kitchen! Back in the classroom, Miss F-J read the story Sam Plants a Sunflower by Kate Petty then we talked about what a seed needs to grow and looked at a dried sunflower head full of seeds before planting our own sunflower seeds. The children are very excited to watch them grow and will be completing a 'Sunflower Diary' over the next few weeks.

The Reception children are loving their new ice-cream parlour with five different scented and coloured home-made playdoughs!