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 2

  • Animals and Spring

Building Learning Power

Our learning power will be developed by being a Managing Distractions Dinosaur and learning to stay focused on what we are doing and to put all of our effort into our activities and learning.

Communication, Language & Literacy

We will be writing a simple letter to the zoo based on the story ‘Dear Zoo’. Can we use a ‘wow’ adjective to describe an animal? We will be acting out and retelling stories using props from our story sacks to develop our story language.

The story sacks include objects, keywords, materials and pictures from the story that enable children to fully immerse themselves in a story world.

Who am I? We will be writing clues describing jungle animals and reading them to our friends. We will revise sounds taught in the last term and learn new sounds including some tricky words. We will be Noticing Newts by looking at the daily changes the chicks go through and recording this in our chick diary.

Mathematics

We will continue to master the numbers 8 to 10 and look at different ways of making these numbers, such as one part is 5 and the other part is 3: the whole is 8. We will focus on looking at patterns in numbers and attempting to write these as calculations, for example, 5+3=8.

Sequencing our school day using time language such as first, next, then. How many cubes can you fit in your hand? We will use non-standard methods to estimate and measure different objects in our classroom.

We will also be using scales to compare objects by weight.

BASICS & Characteristics of Learning

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

  • Keeping on trying – Persisting with activity when challenges occur.
  • Being willing to have a go – Taking a risk, engaging in new experiences, and learning by trial and error.

Personal, Social & Emotional

We are becoming problem solvers! Can we sort out little problems by ourselves? Such as somebody having a toy we want to play with or a friend not wanting to play our game. Can we can manage our feelings when something upsets or annoys us?

Physical Development

We will be focusing on our letter formation and making sure we use our handwriting phrases to form our letters correctly. We also want to make sure that lazy letters hang below the line whilst tall letters nearly touch the top line (but don’t!).

In our P.E sessions we will be introducing ‘Kick rounders’ and begin to talk about being a good team player. We will be learning to take turns and work together to achieve a high score.

Expressive Arts & Design

With the children’s help we will be transforming our role play area into a new imaginary world.

We will be making a range of animal puppets, masks and props to add to our role play areas. In our dance lessons we will be practising a variety of movements which we will be showing in a special dance performance for all Reception parents on Wednesday 25th March at 9 am.

Understanding the World

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

We will be visited by some fluffy friends who arrive in their eggs and then miraculously hatch right before our eyes! Through these observations of animals, we will learn about lifecycles.