Welcome to Reception - 

Hedgehog Class

Teacher:                     Mrs Whatcott

Teaching Assistant:     Mrs Garland

Welcome to Reception. In our Early Years class, children are encouraged and supported to become independent and curious learners. We provide lots of opportunities for active learning within the classroom  and our outdoor provision. Children are encouraged to think critically, be creative learners and explore their surroundings.

The children have access to a range of areas of learning including:

Three Prime areas of learning:

• Personal, Social & Emotional Development
• Physical Development
• Communication & Language

Four Specific areas of learning:

• Literacy
• Maths
• Understanding the World
• Expressive Arts & Design

Summer Term 2025 

What we will be learning about this term

Personal Social and Emotional Development (PSED) 

Jigsaw 

We start by looking at our family and how this can differ from other families and the jobs people do in our families, do you take turns to lay the table or load the dishwasher? We will look at how we make friends, what it is like to feel lonely and what we can do about it. We will look at ways to solve the problems that arise between friends and how we can be a good friend.

Stories to support our learning this half term are ‘The Family Book’, ‘Double Trouble for Anna Hibiscus’, ‘Meesha Makes Friends’, ‘Kind’ and ‘Ravi’s Roar’.

Our key vocabulary this half term is family, jobs, responsible, home, friend, lonely, relationship, solutions, falling out, upset, angry, problem solve, unkind, unkind words, upset, hurtful, angry, happy, excited, upset, worried, friendly, kind words

Our topic in the final half term is Changing Me and learning how to cope with change positively. We will learn about body part names and revisit foods that our healthy for out bodies. We will look at the human life cyle and how we grow from babies to adults. We talk about the transition from Reception into Year 1 and how we can express our feelings about this, including any worries we might have. We will look back on our year in Reception culminating in a Celebration Assembly. 

Stories to support our learning this half term are ‘Look Inside Your Body’, ‘Funnybones’, ‘When we were ‘Once There Were Giants’, ‘Oliver’s Vegetables’, ‘‘The Huge Bag of Worries’ and  ‘Ruby’s Worry’.

Our key vocabulary for this topic are body and the body part names, healthy, less healthy, food, activities, exercise, changed, change, baby, adult, grow up, Year 1, moving, worries, emotions, thoughts, feeling, worry box, memories, memory, achieved, learnt, looking forward.

PE

In class the children will continue to do regular Funky Fingers activities to develop their fine motor skills.

PE will continue to be with Mr. Stops in a Friday morning. Please can children come into school in their PE kits.

Phonics

(Twinkl Phonics Scheme) 

In phonics children will be continuing with their daily phonics lesson.  Some children will be continuing with Level 4 where they will be

• consolidating their knowledge of graphemes in reading and spelling words, especially digraphs and trigraphs;
• learning to read and spell words with adjacent consonants;
• to learn read polysyllabic words
• learn to read  said, so, have, like, come, some, were, there, little, one, do, when, out and what
• learn to spell the tricky words from Level 3 he, she, we, me, be, my, they, are, all, here, you, was.

Other children will be revisiting Level 3 where they will:

• revisit / learn 28 GPCs, including consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs and trigraphs so that children can represent 52 phonemes with a grapheme.
• They will learn / revisit the tricky words  he, she, we, me, be, my, they, are, all, here, you, was
• They will learn to spell the tricky words  from Level 2 I, no, go, the, to.
• they will continue to practise CVC blending and segmentation and apply their knowledge of blending and segmenting when reading, and spelling simple two-syllable words, captions and sentences.

We will be focusing on forming letters correctly and continue our learning on the letter families in order to be write sentences that can be read by themselves and others.

Maths

(Mastering Number – National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics)

We will continue to follow the NCTEM Mastering Number and will be building on skills learned so far.

Subitising

• continue to practise increasingly familiar subitising arrangements, including those which expose ‘1 more’ or ‘doubles’ patterns
• use subitising skills to enable children to identify when patterns show the same number but in a different arrangement, or when patterns are similar but have a different number
• subitise structured and unstructured patterns, including those which show numbers within 10, in relation to 5 and 10
• be encouraged to identify when it is appropriate to count and when groups can be subitised.

Cardinality, ordinality and counting

• continue to develop verbal counting to 20 and beyond, including counting from different starting numbers
• continue to develop confidence and accuracy in both verbal and object counting.

Composition

• continue to explore the composition of 10.         

Comparison

• order sets of objects, linking this to their understanding of the ordinal number system.

In summer 2 the children will consolidate their understanding of concepts previously taught through working in a variety of contexts and with different numbers.

Religious Education (RE)

In RE our topic is ‘How do people know how to treat each other?’ Many religious and non-religious worldviews teach the importance of treating others with kindness and respect, often inspired by stories and key figures. The children will learn about the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius and how the ‘Golden Rule’—treating others as you want to be treated—is a common principle across many traditions. The children will learn that Jesus and the stories he told are important for most people with

Christian worldviews and can provide inspiration for how to treat others, in the same way that Muhammad (PBUH) and the stories he told are important for most people with Islamic worldviews and can provide inspiration for how to treat others.

Children will also be exploring why the word ‘God’ is so important to Christians, learning about the Christian perspective on the creation of the world and how  Christians like to say thank you to their creator by praying and singing.

Topic

This half term, as we wend our way closer towards summer, our topic is ‘Sunshine and Sunflowers’. Children will be learning how to care for plants and animals in their local environment and how to stay safe in the sun.  The companion project is ‘Shadows and Reflections’ and teaches children about natural phenomena, including shadows, reflections and echoes. They explore how shadows are formed and how they can change.

In the final half term of the academic year the children will be learning about the global community to which they belong and exploring how living things, communities and climates differ around the world in the topic ‘Big Wide World’. The companion project is ‘Splash! Here children will learn about water, including floating and sinking, freezing and melting, and why it is important for living things to stay hydrated.

Music

Our topic is ‘Big Bear Funk’ where children will be

• Listening and appraising Funk music including songs such as Big Bear Funk by Joanna Mangona, I Feel Good (I Got You) by James Brown, Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing by Incognito, My Promise by Earth Wind & Fire, Superstition by Stevie Wonder, Superstition by Stevie Wonder
• Embedding foundations of the interrelated dimensions of music using voices and instruments
• Learning to sing Big Bear Funk and revisiting other nursery rhymes and action songs
• Playing instruments within the song
• Improvisation using voices and instruments
• Learning about riff-based composition