Reception Curriculum Overview

Tricky word of the week

Key Information

  • Phonic homework is given out every Thursday. Please work every day with your child to practise recently taught phonic sounds and words.
  • Reading books are given out every Thursday. Please read every day at home. Bring your completed reading record into school on Tuesday with your reading and library books.
  • A weekly newsletter is sent out every Friday. At the bottom of each newsletter, we provide a suggested home activity. Please make an effort to do this with your child over the weekend.
  • Our PE day is Friday. The children should come to school wearing their P.E Kit on this day.

Spring 1

  • SPACE & WINTER

Building Learning Power

  • Our learning power will be developed by being Noticing Newts and becoming more aware of our surroundings, noticing similarities and differences in our environment.

Communication, Language & Literacy

5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Blast off! This term we will be learning about space. Looking at the story of ‘Whatever Next’, we will be using our imagination to pretend we are astronauts and aliens. We will be writing postcards, using wow adjectives to describe aliens and writing a crime scene report of a mysterious crash landing (shhh, don’t tell the children).

We will be looking at the story of the Chinese New Year; retelling it using props and talk and deciding on the wishes we would like to make.

Now that the children are in groups for phonics, we will revise sounds taught in the last term and learn new sounds including more tricky words.

Mathematics

We will be mastering the numbers 6 to 10 and looking at different ways of making these numbers, such as one part is 4 and the other part is 2: the whole is 6 (4+2=6).

We will teach the concept of subtraction using lots of fun and practical activities such as setting up a fruit stall, using our counting fingers and real-life objects to solve the problem. Revisiting the language of more/less than we will be focussing on working one more/less using cubes and counters.

We will hold outdoor experiments in which we will estimate the number of objects in a container and how many steps it takes to get from one side of the playground to the other.

BASICS & Characteristics of Learning

This half term we will be focussing on the following two characteristics:

  • Creating and thinking critically – choosing ways to do things and finding new ways.
  • Playing and exploring – Finding out and exploring

Personal, Social & Emotional

We will be introducing new learning partners in the class where we will learn to take turns when talking to each other. We will revisit our class promises and use role play scenarios to find compromises and to solve problems, for example, sharing a toy.

Physical Development

In our P.E sessions, we will be learning to travel in different ways under and over objects, balancing and experimenting with moving our bodies in a variety of ways.

We will be using our bodies to pretend to move like planets, astronauts and shooting stars around the playground.

We will continue to develop fine motor skills through a range of activities such as cutting with scissors, building with Lego and using tweezers to pick up small beads.

Expressive Arts & Design

We will be transforming our role play area into an intergalactic space station.

Using Papier Mache and balloons we will be creating our own planets! Just like Baby Bear in ‘Whatever Next’ we will be making rockets out of
junk modelling to propel us into space.

In celebration of Chinese New Year, we will be making a variety of crafts such as lanterns, blossoms for our wishing tree and traditional money pockets.

Understanding the World

In our ICT lessons, we will continue to learn how to log on to computers and how to hold and control a mouse correctly.

We will be conducting an ice experi- ment which involves rescuing frozen aliens using a variety of materials and recording how long this takes.

Through our space topic, we will be looking at similarities and differences between our environment and space.