Southborough Church of England Primary School
Southborough Church of England Primary School
Forest
Reception Curriculum 2024-2025
Knowledge Organisers:
October Phonics Workshop
Christmas Performance song lyric
This week in Forest Class
Week commencing 25th November
Sparkle and Shine is our new topic in Reception and the children are excited to be learning about celebrations and winter festivals. The Knowledge Organiser for this topic is above, so please take a look at it.
A significant part of how we celebrate this term is our Christmas performance. A PDF of the song lyrics is available above. If your child has been sent home with lines to learn, please can you help them practise these at home and encourage them to use a loud voice when they say them. Thank you to parents who have already sent their child’s costume to school in a clearly labelled bag, please make sure that your child’s costume is in school by 29th November. Please let us know if there are any problems with getting a costume together.
Continuing the celebratory theme, our music lessons this term have looked at celebration music from festivals and cultures around the world and this week’s focus in Hannukah.
In phonics this week, the children learned the ck sound and also continued to learn and practise “red” words I, me and the. It has been wonderful to hear the children talk about the phonics games they have been playing with you at home since our phonics workshop. We love to hear about it. This week, see if you can make up and say silly sentences with the red words we have learned, e.g. I have the red rabbit with me!
We have been exploring 2D shapes this week and have been learning the differences between squares and rectangles. The children were quite surprised to learn that not all shapes with four sides are squares and have learned that they need to look more closely at the shape to see what length the sides are.
This week's Talking Task
Use the Sparkle and Shine Knowledge Organiser, in the PDF file above and explore the key vocabulary. What celebrations do you have in your home and community? Can you bring in a special object that might be shared in class that tells us about your celebration, for example a Diva lamp, menorah, Christmas decoration or some special clothing?
To enable children to develop their language skills, we have used AI to translate this into other languages spoken in our school community.
Numbots
To use Numbots, for games to support number knowledge, confidence and fluency go to https://play.numbots.com/#/intro If you need your child's log-in please ask your class teacher.
This week in Forest Class
Reception Class Teachers
Reception Teaching Team
A typical day in the life of a Reception child:
| A typical day (but not always!) |
|
8.20/8.30 | Adventure Time | Infant gate opens from 8.20am until 8.30am. Parents bring children to classroom back doors. Teachers greet children, children encouraged to put their belongings away, self-register and then join in the self-selected activities. Teaching Assistant supporting children to become more independent as our aim is for children to be able to “think and do for themselves”. |
8.35am | Welcome Collective worship | Children gather on the carpet, the teacher will explain the visual timetable (and will continue to do this across the day) to prepare the children for what is next or any changes. Daily Collective worship to reflect being a Church of England School. |
8.50am | Plan & Adventure Time
| Continuous and enhanced provision in all Areas of Learning accessed both in the indoor and outdoor classrooms. Staff encourage children to develop the characteristics of effective learning as they engage with an extensive range of activities and opportunities. Staff are trained to carry out high quality interactions with the children to develop their skills further. |
9.30am | Review and snack | Fruit supplied by the school. |
9.45am | Phonics | Short (Read Write Inc) Phonics adult led session to learn to recognise and write sounds, then sound out and blend them to read words and decode words to spell. In addition to discrete phonics teaching, children are encouraged to use recognise and use their phonics skills across the curriculum. |
10am | Adventure Time
| As above |
11.00am | Review and Maths: Teacher Directed
| Children discuss their activities in Adventure Time. Maths- short teacher led session |
11.30am | Lunch | TAs support children with their lunch in the hall.
|
12.00pm | Outdoor Play | TAs support outdoor play. |
12.20 | TA story | TAs bring children in from play and read a story to the class. |
12.30pm | Teacher directed | Additional short teacher-led sessions take place which include maths, circle time, literacy, music, R.E., P.E. and Corner Stones based topic lessons. These short inputs feed into the child-initiated learning enabling children to use the resources to further |
12.45pm | Adventure Time
| Children who have been assessed as needing additional support with Language, speech, and other identified areas, will be supported in short, frequent, small group boosters. |
2.15pm | Phonics Review / Review of the day Milk | Recap of Phonics learning / and other learning during the day. Some children have milk (free until 5th birthday) |
2:30pm | Magic Maths | Short teacher led session |
2.45pm | Story Time Home preparation | Final story of the day.
Children gather their belongings and await the arrival of their parent. The outdoor area is closed to all at this time. |
3pm | Parents Arrive | The infant gate is opened at 3pm. Strict protocols followed with collection lists. Any queries should be radioed to the office for clarification, or a member of SLT called. Parents encouraged to only have brief handover conversation, and to call the office for telephone call appt for longer conversations. |