St John's Church of England Primary School

Reception Class - Autumn Term 2021

Me and My World!

Welcome to St. John's Reception class! We will be making lots of new friends this half term and finding out what it means to be a St. Johner. Our mission statement - Love of God, Love of Neighbour, Love of Oneself - is central to everything we do at St. John's, so we will be learning what each part of this means to us. 

As part of our topic we will be talking about our families and what makes us special and we will be making self-portraits using different art media. We will be finding out about the places where we live, identifying local landmarks and making simple maps of our localities.  

We will be trying to improve our fine motor skills to help us to become stronger writers, doing 'Dough Gym' and 'Write Dance' which should be lots of fun! We will be reading lots of new stories, as well as those we know well, and will take home our very own first reading books to share with our families! We will also be starting our guided reading groups and will have special activities to do in our Reading Partnership books - exciting times ahead! 

Just as important as the fine motor skills are our gross motor skills. We will be doing lots of work this term to develop our control and coordination. We do this through our structured PE lessons  and our gymnastic lessons with .  We will also be working really hard in the outdoor area on our bike skills. We already have a number of children who have pedaled a two wheeled bike for the first time. So it may be time to take those stabilizers off bikes at home. Handy tip - if you take off the stabilizers and pedals - encourage your child to use the bike as a balance bike first - and then once they are balancing confidently put the pedals back on and away they go!

In Maths we will be doing lots of work and playing games to help us become more confident counting accurately to 10, (forwards and backwards). We will be using the numicon to help us count, recognize what numbers look like and order numbers.

Our phonics lessons are always really popular with the children. We are learning to listen for and say sounds in words. this will help us become really good readers and writers.

Watch out for the reading partnership black books coming home this half term too. 

It's Healthy schools week this half term (27th Sept - 1st  Oct) so we will be learning what foods are healthy and what we can do to help us stay fit, safe and feeling good!  

We look forward to working in partnership with all our parents and carers. Don't forget to make sure you have regular access to your seesaw app so you can see what we are up to in school. 

Mrs Hickson, Miss Connolly, Mrs Kennedy, Mrs Boulton and Miss Stanfield