Reception – Beech Class

Miss Gettings is very pleased to welcome your child into Reception and looks forward to supporting them as they begin their school journey.

🌟'Once Upon a Time'🌟

This term, our Reception children are stepping into the magical world of traditional tales! We’ll be exploring much‑loved stories such as Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Through these stories, the children will:

🧚‍♀️ Meet wonderful characters – from brave heroes to curious bears
🌲 Explore enchanting settings – deep forests, cosy cottages and more
📚 Follow exciting storylines – full of mystery, adventure and fun

We’ll be learning about how stories are built, thinking carefully about the beginning, middle, and end, and having a go at predicting what might happen next. Children will also learn exciting new vocabulary and practise retelling their favourite tales in their own expressive ways—using words, actions, and plenty of imagination!

It’s going to be a magical journey into the world of stories, and we can’t wait to see the children bring these tales to life!

Phonics and Literacy

This term, our Reception children will continue to grow into confident early readers and writers as they build on all the amazing phonics learning they’ve already done!

🎧🔠 Consolidating Phase 3 Sounds

We’ll be revisiting and strengthening the Phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs, helping children to apply these sounds when blending for reading and segmenting for spelling.
They’ll practise reading and spelling CVCC and CCVC words such as fish, shed, jump, and spin, becoming more fluent and accurate each week.

🐸👛 Exploring Phase 4 Consonant Blends

We’re also beginning to explore new consonant blends in Phase 4. Children will meet words like:

• lamp
• belt
• crab
  These help them listen closely to individual sounds and build longer words with confidence.

✏️⭐ Tricky Words

Children will be working on spelling Phase 2 and Phase 3 tricky words, and reading new Phase 4 tricky words. These are the words that don’t always follow the usual phonics rules, so we learn to recognise them by sight.

📝📘 Super Sentence Writing

As part of our writing journey, we’ll be learning how to build brilliant sentences by remembering to:

• Start with a capital letter
• Leave a finger space between each word
• Finish with a full stop

We’ll be practising writing simple sentences using our phonics knowledge—encouraging children to have a go, be brave, and enjoy writing!

Maths

This term, our Reception children will be growing their confidence as mathematicians through hands‑on exploration, problem‑solving and lots of practical fun!

🔢 Counting with Confidence

We will begin by consolidating counting from 11–20, making sure children can say the numbers in order, recognise them, and match them to quantities.
Once secure, we’ll move on to counting beyond 20, noticing the counting pattern and learning how numbers continue to build as they get bigger.

➕➖ Adding and Taking Away Within 20

Children will explore addition and subtraction in meaningful, practical ways. They’ll use objects, pictures, tens frames, and number stories to help them understand:

• What it means to add more
• What it means to take away
• How to explain their thinking in simple sentences

🔷🔶 Exploring 2D Shapes

We’ll spend time getting to know a range of 2D shapes and looking closely at how they are made. Children will:

• Explore shape composition by using shapes to build pictures, patterns and new shapes
• Recap shape properties, including how many sides and corners each shape has
• Develop their reasoning by talking about similarities and differences between shapes

Through play, construction, art and outdoor learning, children will discover how shapes are all around us and how we can use them creatively.