Welcome to our Reception Webpage!
We would like to tell you all about Reception and how learning takes place. We will update this webpage to keep you informed of the exciting things we do and to give you some tips on how you can support your child. Please use your child's Tapestry account too!
Mrs Kimitris (RK Teacher and EYFS Leader) Mrs Holden (RK) Miss Marsden (RM)
(Monday - Thursday) (Friday)
Mrs Woodcock Mrs Edwards Mrs Owen
(RK Teaching Assistant) (RM Teaching Assistants)
Organisation of classes within Reception
We are a two form entry school which provides 60 places within each Reception cohort. Each Reception cohort is broken down in to two classes of 30 children. Both classes share an open plan indoor and outdoor learning environment.
Our Aims
At Woodhey’s our aim is to provide children with a wide range of stimulating, creative and challenging early learning experiences within a secure, caring and inclusive environment, both within the classroom and outdoors. Our school values of together we achieve more, challenging ourselves to grow and flourish,happy and passionate to learn and caring for and respecting others are at the heart of what we do.
We provide children with opportunities to explore and enquire: developing their understanding of the world around them through 'real life' experiences, stimulating resources, and adult led and child-led activities.
We aim to offer every child a consistent and personalised learning experience to ensure that all children who attend our EYFS department make good progress from where their learning journey started and are not left behind. During carpet sessions and continuous provision, we focus upon each child's personal next steps to ensure they are given the best possible opportunities to excel within our environment and achieve their age-related expectation (Good Level of Developement).
Please find more information in our EYFS Policy.
Please find more information in our EYFS Vision Statement.
Our Curriculum
Our early years setting follows the curriculum as outlined in the 'EYFS Statutory Framework' and the 'Development Matters' guidance material.
The EYFS framework includes 7 areas of learning and development that are equally important and inter-connected. However, 3 areas known as the prime areas are seen as particularly important for igniting curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, and for building children’s capacity to learn, form relationships and thrive.
The prime areas are:
- Communication and language
- Physical development
- Personal, social and emotional development
The prime areas are strengthened and applied through 4 specific areas:
- Literacy
- Mathematics
- Understanding the world
- Expressive arts and design
Start of Reception/ Baseline
When children first start in Reception, we offer them a transitional period where they can initially visit the environment with a parent/carer and then attend for short periods of time by themselves. We feel that this gives each child the best possible start to our school and enables the following:
- our teaching staff to build a strong relationship with each family;
- our teaching staff get to know each child, including their interests and needs;
- our teaching staff are able to meet each child's interests and needs;
- each child gets to know and can begin to build a strong and positive relationship with our teaching staff;
- each child becomes familiar and happy with their new school environment, its routines and expectations;
- each child will have met and made friends with some of the other children who will be in their class.
Each child will be given a key worker who will be able to help make them feel safe and cared for. During the Autumn term, each key worker group will have snack together and talk about their interests and family news.
Once we are confident that each child has settled in positively, we will begin 'baselining' the children. This is a 6-week informal process that will enable us to work closely with each child and find out about their interests, needs and abilities. The children will think that we are just 'playing' with them and will not be aware of this process. In addition to our gathering of information, the Government have implemented a statutory Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) that all Reception children are required to complete.The RBA will be an activity-based assessment of each child’s academic starting points in:
- language, communication and literacy
- mathematics
The RBA will be a short task-based assessment. Each child will use practical resources to complete these tasks and our teaching staff will record the results on the government RBA website. We will be required to carry out the assessment within the first 6 weeks of pupils starting reception. No numerical score will be shared with schools and the data will only be used by the government at the end of year 6 to form the school-level progress measure. To find out further about this statutory requirement, please access the 'RBA Government' webpage.
Once our 6-week baseline period has been completed, we will begin to focus further on specific areas of learning and give each parent a bespoke 'Next Step' sheet which will highlight their child's individual learning aims.
Parent- School Relationships
We strongly believe that positive parent-school relationships can influence a child's school experience and ensure they continue to flourish. We aim to keep parents up to date with their child's learning through a variety of ways. These include:
- Tapestry (Online Learning Journey that has at least 2 observations added each week)
- Personalised Next Steps that are released 4 times a year (Autumn, Spring and Summer Term)
- End of Year Report (Summer Term)
- Parents Evenings (Autumn and Spring Term)
- Parent Workshops (Autumn, Spring and Summer Term)
- Stay and Play Sessions (Spring and Summer Term)
- Weekly Parent Home Learning Guides
- Reading Records that are updated weekly
- Daily Contact at the start and end of school
- Tree-mendous Behaviour Leaves (Home Learning Link)
- Golden Certificates from our Celebration Assemblies
Reception Tour Videos
We have made a Reception tour videos to show our new parents our Reception setting. Both Reception classes share the same outdoor and indoor continuous provision but they have separate carpet and tray areas. Please play the videos below to find out a little bit more:
Tour Video
Parental Support
Welcome Workshop (Start of Year)
We run a Parent Welcome Workshop before children start at our school, to ensure we help parents learn about our school systems and key information. Click on the links below to open up the PowerPoint.
Tapestry and Systems Workshop (Autumn Term)
For those parents who would like to recap on our parent workshop or who were unable to attend, please find a copy of our parent workshop Powerpoint below. Click on the links below to open up the PowerPoint and the Booklet.
Stay and Play Sessions
Please remember to check our ParentMail messages to see when our next Parent Stay and Play session is scheduled for.
Phonics
To help you assist your child with their phonics, we have attached two videos below - one shows the correct way to say each sound, and the other shows our jolly phonics songs that the children learn as part of their lessons. We are thrilled with the progress that the children are making with their sound books and we thank you for your support at home. As they begin to get reading books, we ask you to encourage them with simple words that can be sounded out, and help them with some of the trickier vocabulary that they won't yet be familiar with. Let them make up their own stories and use the picture clues to help them decipher the words. If you can sign the yellow reading record each time you hear them at home we can then change their books on a Tuesday. The children are also making good use of their sound books and practising writing out their sounds - this is a fabulous way to help them become independent writers!
Our News
Please log in to your Tapestry account to view your child's personal learning experience at our school. It is a good system to support home discussions about school days. Your Tapestry login email has been sent to you. If you are unable to access your child's account, then please let our EYFS team know and we will be happy to help.