Reception

It is a pleasure to support the youngest children at Bickerstaffe CE School and Nursery. We take pride in fostering their curiosity, creativity, and confidence in a warm and nurturing environment. Each day is filled with opportunities for discovery, building great friendships, and laying the foundation for a lifelong love of learning. 

Useful info for the school week:

• Mrs Hunter is in class on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesdays.
• Mrs Crook is in class on Thursday and Fridays.
• Miss Pech and Mrs Wilson are in class Monday - Friday, morning only 
• Homework bags to be sent in on Tuesdays. Homework will be sent out on Wednesdays. 
• Please keep reading diaries in homework bags so we can see who is reading at home and ensure they receive their rewards.
• PE is on Tuesdays and Fridays. 
• Spanish is on Monday afternoons. 
• The Library bus comes to school every three weeks on a Friday. Each child gets to visit the bus to borrow a book. 

Home Learning

To help nurture a lifelong love of reading, nursery children will have the opportunity to choose books from our class and school library to share with families at home. 

For our reception children, we ask families to continue sharing books at home. This can be any kind of book, including non-fiction. As they begin to learn the names and sounds of letters, we will send home books for you to read with your child. These books will be linked to their phonic ability, to provide the best support in their reading journey.

We will also send home a sheet of homework each week. This may be reading, writing or maths for reception children, and for our nursery children it may be maths or mark making. 

Autumn 2

This half-term we are fully immersing ourselves in Drawing Club. 

Drawing Club is an approach designed by Greg Bottrill that immerses children into a world full of imagination. We have embraced drawing club and can see the joy it brings to the children. It is through drawing club that we open up the magic world of tales and story to children whilst at the same time enriching their language skills, developing their fine motor and share a really special time with them. Drawing Club is a fantastic place to start a child’s experience of school ‘Literacy’.  

Each week we follow a similar pattern which is shown below;

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday
Vocab	Vocab	Vocab	Vocab
Character	Setting	Adventure Time: I Wonder...	Adventure Time: I Wonder...

Drawing Club is based upon the 3M principle. These are making conversation, mark making and mathematics. We use a book, traditional tale or an animation as a portal for the week.

Every day we have vocabulary time where we learn new words associated with our story of the week which stretches their vocabulary beyond the story. We then read our story twice, on Monday and Tuesday so that the children become familiar with the story if they haven`t heard it before. The next part of the session includes the drawing where we take an element of the book and draw something based on the days focus.

For example, Monday is a character based session so we look at the character in the story and draw our own version of that character. One of the most exciting parts of Drawing Club is adding secret symbols and passwords to our drawings. We always draw a secret symbol that can make anything happen! Sometimes we press them and aliens or unicorns become 3 times bigger, pencils turn into chocolate or hair turns multi-coloured! We then add a password to make the secret symbol work. This can be a mark, letter, digraph (2 letters that make one sound), a word or a sentence. As children make progress and become more confident with their phonics, their passwords develop and move towards phrases and sentences.  

The Adventure Time: I wonder... sessions towards the end of the week are where we imagine what might happen if we got to choose an element of the story. An example of these questions and how we discuss the story during Adventure Time is shown below using the text - The Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Wednesday	Thursday
What foods could we give the troll so he doesn`t want to eat the goats?	We need to set a trap for the troll, what could we create?

 

The books we will be suing this half term are:

• 🐷 The Three Little Pigs

• 🍪 The Gingerbread Man

• ❤️ Little Red Riding Hood

• 🌱 Jack and the Beanstalk

• 🎄 The Christmas Pine by Julia Donaldson

• 🌿 Stick Man

• 🎅 Father Christmas Needs a Wee

Maths

 

Reception maths overview:

Nursery maths overview:

Phonics

Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.

We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.

If you would like to find out more about RWI and hope to support your child at home when reading, please have a look at the links below:

Helpful videos for Parents and Carers

RWI Reading at Home Booklet 1

RWI Reading at Home Booklet 2

What is Read Write Inc

10 things to think about when you read to your child

Reception

Set 1 Special Friends

Here are some video links your child can watch at home to help learn Set 1 Special Friends (two letters that make one sound). 

sh, qu, th, ng, ch, nk and ck

Red Words

Ditty 1

Ditty 2

Word Time - Blending to read

Word Time fun with Joshua

Word Time fun with Nell

Word Time fun with Maya

Word Time Reading 1.7

Word Time Reading 1.7 1

Fred Games

Here are some videos to support oral blending.  These videos are suitable for our nursery children too. 

Party

Adventure in the woods

Weather

Body parts

Fred's fridge

Toybox

Farmyard

Finally, a fantastic video that just sums up how special working in the Early Years is:

The Power of Play

Thank you, 

Mrs Hunter and Mrs Crook