Welcome to Reception at Bramley Park Academy

Learning in Reception is all about laying the foundations of all future learning through having fun and having lots of hands-on practical experiences. We do lots of that from the very moment we walk through the door.

Our Curriculum

Our curriculum is rich in stories and songs to support our language development and open up the door to a range of themes, topics and hooks to inspire our curiosity and wonder! Through careful planning, we cover all 7 areas of the EYFS curriculum and build our love of learning along the way! We lay the foundations ready for the KS1 curriculum to build on so it is really important that we learn all about the past and present, the people who live in our communities as well as how to use a range of music and art skills. We also have a wonderful journey into the world of reading and writing.

Take a look at our long-term curriculum maps on the main page to see what exciting adventures and skills we are learning each half term! I bet you cannot wait to join us!

Phonics in Reception

We love our SuperSonic Phonic Friends!

To support the planning and delivery of phonics in school, we use Supersonic Phonic Friends to provide rigorous, well-planned, consistent daily engaging phonics lessons.

During the Reception year we are introduced to phonemes and their corresponding graphemes. We begin to look at single letter sounds and the representing spelling for this. This enables us to then begin to read and write three letter words; matching the grapheme to the sound we can hear.

As we become confident and fluent readers and writers of CVC words we are then introduced to digraphs; where two letters make one sound. Throughout the whole of the reception year our phonic teaching relies on the firm foundations of orally blending and segmenting and is deep rooted in rhythm and rhyme. By the end of EYFS we should be fluent with all 44 sounds; including one way to represent them. We also learn to read and write tricky words such as I, no, go, to, the.

Making Maths Magic – Our journey into counting and numbers!

Over the course of the year we use the White Rose scheme of work to enable us to count, match, order and manipulate numbers to 10 and beyond. We will be introduced to different concrete resources such as counties, bead strings, numicon and tens frames to allow us to develop a fast recall of groups of objects as well as use these tools for addition and subtraction. We will embed all our learning through play based meaningful activities that will allow teachers to stretch and challenge our thinking.

Through our maths sessions we will also look at shapes, weight, capacity and size to give a firm foundation of these concepts and to use the correct vocabulary to compare and contrast.

Bringing the curriculum to life

Every week in Reception our learning starts with a hook from a book. This will introduce new thinking or vocabulary we will need to support us for the week. As well as this we will also have half termly trips or experiences to support our knowledge and understanding of our themes. Alongside this we will also explore the interest of the children.

We like to ‘Spread the Happiness’.

We are a Spread the Happiness accredited school which means all our staff deliver sessions around Dough Disco, Squiggle me into a Writer and Making Maths Magic. These programmes are designed to strengthen muscles, support recognition and recall and develop fine motor skills ready for writing. We firmly believe that these structures give all children the best start in life as well as having lots of fun! Look out for our challenges as there are lots of fun things to do before you turn 5!

A day in Reception

On a morning we self register ourselves in class by writing our names and then we wake our fingers up by doing Dough Disco! We squeeze, squash and dance our way to being a good writer with fantastic pencil grip! Every day we work on our fine-motor skills to help our brain to control our fingers! We also take part in activities like threading/weaving that also supports the development of our finger muscles! Get ready for Dough Disco!

After our morning routine and our fingers are ready to write it is time for our topic and literacy input. This is where the excitement begins as we start our adventure into the learning focus for the week. We will sing, act, read and create linked to our objective of the week. We will listen to a high quality text and have modelling of writing tasks linked to our ability and then it is over to you to complete the weekly activities.

Before lunch we have our Making Maths Magic session where we develop our counting and recognition skills relating to number, shape and measures. We will learn to add and subtract, double and halve and recall our number bonds to 10.

After lunch it is time for SuperSonic Phonic Friends! Our wonderful new phonic scheme alongside the characters enables us to practise our reading and writing. We learn a sound a day and use them to form words using orally blending and segmenting. We will then learn a new sound of the day and apply this to word reading, writing and then apply it to a caption and sentence. By the end of the year we will have learnt 44 spellings!

A huge and crucial part of our day is play. We spend a long time playing in each area of our wonderful classroom; guided and supported by an adult. Every area is carefully thought out to support learning across all 7 areas and enhanced by the children’s interests. Play is crucial for us to develop our social and communication skills as well as to embed, revisit and review things our teacher has shown us in inputs or from self discovery. We encourage exploration, curiosity and wonder and promote sustained and shared thinking around how/why things work.

Our wonderful outdoor area plays a key role in our learning and can be accessed for extended periods in both the morning and afternoon. Outside we can use large scale movements to run, balance, climb, paint, dance and most importantly to take risks!

Underpinning all our learning and development is the essential skill of talk. We have a great intervention called NELI to support vocabulary development and throughout the day there are lots of opportunities to talk to friends, teachers and even Hamish, our school dog!

We end the day with a story, a song, some RE or circle time. A day in reception is a busy one!