Spotlight on: Reception

Miss Natalie Shale shares stories from Reception class

We have been very busy in Reception since starting school last week; the girls have already taken part in lots of activities, and met all of their new teachers: Miss Elise Hickey (Music), Miss Sophia Huang (Mandarin), Miss Federica (Dance), Madame Marie-Geraldine Lea (French), Mrs Cindy O’Connell (PE) and Mr Andrew Severy (Computer Science). They are also becoming more aware of the resources that are available to them, for instance: the office area, the role play area, and the creative area indoors; bricks, water and sand trays, cubby house, trikes and scooters, the woods, tennis court, adventure playground, Sensory Garden, the stage and the music trail outdoors. Mrs Osmant (our Learning Support Assistant) and I encourage the girls to access these resources independently.

We ensure that the girls take part in a mixture of child-led and teacher-led activities, and we are enjoying finding out as much as possible about the girls and their interests in these first weeks – linking in nicely with our topic this half term, ‘Getting to know you’. We use lots of investigative games, hands-on experience and songs to help the girls develop their literacy and numeracy skills, and encourage the girls to explore their own interests as well.

In the next half term we will be looking forward to Christmas and joining the girls in Year 1 and Year 2 to start practising our Christmas performance. We will also have our first trip as a class, which will be to the Fitzwilliam Museum to look at paintings that tell the story of Christmas.

Below you will see some photos from the first two weeks in Reception class.

The role play area is always very popular with the girls and lots of them enjoyed dressing up and going on holidays or pretending to be doctors and looking after their patients.

We will be growing lots of flowers and vegetables in the Sensory Garden this year, so we had a look round to find out what kinds of things are growing at the moment and collected ideas about what we could plant in the autumn. We picked an apple, and some of the girls tasted it – but it was still quite sour!

The girls had an excellent time in gymnastics with Mrs Cindy O’Connell as they practised different ways of moving and balancing.

We went exploring to find lots of different 2D shapes in the school grounds and in Acton House. Then we used our shape knowledge to make our own ‘shape people’ using plastic shapes.

There was a little trepidation at first when we hunted for snakes in the woods! But the girls were quickly reassured when they found out the snakes weren’t real, and were in fact made from plastic ‘links’. The girls looked for hidden snakes, and then counted the links for each snake and matched the snakes with the appropriate number card.

Everyone had a great time making cakes, potions and other kinds of meals in the Mud Kitchen.

Mr Severy, the new Junior School teacher of Computer Science, helped the girls to develop their fine motor skills using a mouse as they played number games on the computers.

We used pastels to draw wonderful self-portraits, and they are now displayed in our classroom.