Welcome to Reception Class!

Love each other, as God loves us. 

Autumn term 2023

A very warm welcome to all our new reception children and their families to Frodsham CE Primary School. 

We understand that this can be an exciting but also an anxcious time for your family, let us reassure you that it will be our priority to make sure that you and your child feel prepared, confident and excited about starting school.  

Your child's development and happiness is at the heart of everything we do here at Frodsham CE, and we feel that children learn best whilst having fun, feeling safe and happy.  Our aim is to feed your child's curiosity and to inspire them to do their very best.  We use concrete, meaningful and practical learning opportunities that support the children to become independent problem solvers, who are continuously eager to expand their knowledge and skills and have a conscientious attitude to their own learning.  

What is it like in reception class?

Our children say...

"We love having fun and school is such an exciting place to be!  We enjoy learning outside, exploring our wonderful woodlands during forest school, investigating our school pond and playing in our school grounds. We love cooking in the mud kitchen, playing in our water tray and in the huge sandpit; developing our physical skills by climbing on our trim trail, playing with the PE equipment or building up our resilience by trying things that are tricky!  We also love the large construction area outside, using our imagination to build exciting models so we can create our own stories. Dressing up and performing on the outside stage with instruments and costumes is great fun!" 

"Inside the classroom, we enjoy our large creative and mark making areas, dancing to music whilst squeezing playdoh during dough disco time, building in the construction area and making up stories in the small world area.  We develop our fine motor control and build up our finger strength in the Funky fingers area.  We enjoy challenging ourselves in the phonics area and playing in the mathematics area with exciting activities and resources. We like being quiet in our snuggly reading corner, reading books with our friends and also in our reflection area. We also love listening to stories on the carpet and joining in with different voices, singing songs together and playing with all our friends.  We learn to become more independent each day, choosing our own learning activities and develop our abilities to care for one another whilst completing our weekly rainbow challenges."

"Our topics in Reception frequently change and are often chosen by us - we have great ideas! Since starting school we have enjoyed getting to know our Year 6 Big Buddies and love spending time with them; playing games in the playground, reading books together and looking forward to visiting the farm at Christmas.  We've visited St Laurences' church and had our Welcome Service there, in front of all our families.  There are lots of lovely children in our class and we've all made lots of new friends! We work hard in our lessons and love having fun at our fantastic school.

At Frodsham CE we have high expectations for our children. We provide them with a caring, safe and happy classroom environment full of fun and excitement, which will enable them to reach their full potential, develop independence, self discipline and have a love for learning.

Happy children make successful learners! 

A snapshot of some of our adventures so far...

Building up our gross motor control skills using the ribbon wands.

Playing on the Play Quest!

Maths - sorting objects into groups

Where will our adventures take us next? 

Meet the Early Years team:

Mrs Evans – EYFS Lead and Class Teacher

Mrs Owen - Higher Level Teaching Assistant 

Ms Osborne - Teaching Assistant

Ms Hunt-Chambers - Teaching Assistant

Mrs Ryder - Teaching Assistant

Please tell us if you have any worries or concerns. We are always available for a chat. 

Don't Forget...

Waterbottles and Wellies

Please ensure that your child brings a named water bottle into school every morning, filled with fresh water only. We will help your child to refill their bottle during the day if needed.  Also please provide your child with a pair of wellies to keep in school for the year.  We use the outside classroom and the forest area often, and it does tend to get very muddy in there! Don't forget to name all your child's belongings, uniform and shoes. 

Snack

You are welcome to provide your child with fresh fruit or vegetables for their mid morning snack.  We are a healthy school, so only fruit and vetetables are allowed. Please ensure it is labelled with their name.  Children can pop their snack into the snack basket when they arrive into school.  Our kitchen staff also provide hot and cold snacks.  Children can choose between a piece of toast, half a bagel, a crumpet, fresh fruit or raisins.  This can be paid for using the Parentpay system. 

PE

Physical Education lessons are now on a Tuesday morning for Reception.  We will help the children to become confident at getting changed into their PE kits and putting it on independently.  We will be sending PE kits home every half term holiday for a wash and this is also a good chance to check that your child's pumps still fit them.   

Tapestry and Assessment

All reception children starting at Frodsham C of E Primary School will have a personal on-line Learning Journey which records photos, observations and comments, in line with the Early Years Foundation Stage, to build up a record of your child’s experiences during their time in Reception class.

We use Tapestry, an online Learning Journey. You will have secure access (via email address and password) to your child’s Learning Journey and, in addition to viewing our contributions; we encourage you to add to it by uploading photos and comments, or commenting on observations made by us.

Phonics and Reading

At Frodsham CE, we continuously encourage children to read for pleasure to enable them to become confident readers. We follow a structured phonics programme called ‘Read, Write Inc’ which supports and develops reading and writing skills.  To begin with we will assess the children during the first few weeks in school (baseline assessment) to see what they already know and from there we will start our daily phonics lessons.  

Some photographs from our first phonics lesson.  

Once your child has started learning their sounds, we will assess their ability to blend them together to make words.  When we feel your child is ready they will bring home a reading book. For some children they will bring home a book with no words and we ask you to use the prompt sheets to share the book with your children. Other children will bring home books with words. The children will need to be encouraged to sound out and blend the words in order to help them read the text.

Squiggle Whilst You Wriggle

You may have heard your child talking about something called 'Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle' so I thought I would share some information with you about it. 

Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle is an early writing program created by a Shonette Bason-Wood, who also created the program Dough Disco. Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle incorporates dance, music and large movements to help children develop the fine muscle control they need for writing.  They will learn a new gross motor movement to a piece of music while holding 'flappers' (bits of fabric) while dancing along to the music. The children then transfer these movements to floor level and swap their flappers for writing tools (crayons/pens etc) to make marks, this could be in foam, on paper, in sand etc. but we often use large pieces of paper on the floor.  They will then use this action to think of letters they can form that use this shape.  These sessions are great fun but most importantly help your child to be confident mark makers.

Shonette Bason-Wood is incredibly fun, motivating and excites the children to engage in this program. It’s all about mark making and Shonette will show you how to develop children's writing in a fun and exciting and extremely active way.  

How to Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle at home? 

If you would like to try it at home watch the videos on YouTube.  If you search 'Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle' on Youtube you will find a range of videos and songs to enjoy while you are Squiggling.  Grab some flappers (could be tissues or bits of material), find some mark making tools and turn the music up!  Once you have completed the movements and the mark making see which letters you can see on your paper. Can you write those letters too?