Monksmead School

Reception

Further information for new families who are joining our Early Years classes can be found here.

Teacher: Mrs Cornwell

Support Staff:  Mrs Smith  & Ms Sweeney

News from Reception

Dear Parents,

Happy New Year! It’s lovely to be back and the children have been very excited to catch up with their friends. The first week was great and the children have been very engaged and busy.

We are continuing to work hard on looking after and respecting our resources e.g. lids on pens, picking up toys we might see on the floor to prevent accidents and resources getting broken, putting books back on the shelf when finished and watching where we walk.

We have an exciting half term ahead and hope to have some visitors coming into school to support the children’s learning experiences.

After some initial work on the New Year and winter, our main topic this half term is ‘Everyday Heroes’.  If any parents have jobs that provide a service and ‘help us’ and would be willing to come into school and do a short talk to the class, then this would be great! Please let me know.

Activities are planned to cover all areas of Early Years curriculum through direct teaching (carpet time and group sessions) and during our provision when the children ‘choose’ their learning (ChIL).  Please see this half term’s topic map for more details of learning in each of the seven areas.

Literacy

Our core books have been chosen to support learning around our topics as well being used to directly teach our literacy curriculum. This half term we will be re-visiting stories about winter and then reading a lot of non-fiction texts about a number of different jobs where people help us.

Phonics

Daily ELS phonics sessions will continue and we will be introducing lots of digraphs. These are where two letters represent one sound eg ‘ai ‘as in ‘rain’. The two letters cannot be separately sounded out to make the sound. A new sound mat will be sent home. Please keep this safe and use it at home. It shows the order of sounds that we will be covering in phonics and can be referred to when your child is reading and writing to help support them. It can foster independence as they look up things on the sound mat rather than just being told. Updates on Tapestry and homework will keep you informed as to which sounds we are currently learning. Please read with your child as much as possible at home and let us know how they are doing by briefly commenting in their reading diary.

Maths

The children will build on their understanding of the composition of numbers by investigating the composition of 3, 4 and 5. Composing and de-composing numbers involves the children investigating part–part–whole relations, e.g. seeing that 3 can be composed of 1 and 2. Through practical experience, they will consolidate their understanding of a whole being made up of smaller parts. They will begin to recognise that numbers can be made by combining parts in different ways. A key focus will be the spatial arrangements that can be made with different combinations of the same number of objects.

The children will talk about arrangements that they see and apply their knowledge of subitising. E.g. Looking at the above “I can see there are 5 because it looks like the pattern on a dice.” The adult might then ask if they can see any patterns within the 5 dots. “I can also see there’s a pattern of two green dots and 3 blue dots.”

Some children may notice the 3 blue dots first or the 1 green and another green. All these observations are part of their deep understanding of number composition.

The adults will then support children in connecting all of these discoveries together 

e.g. “ So what does a 2 and 3 make?” “Can you show this on your fingers. Let’s count them and check that 2 fingers add 3 fingers, make 5 fingers altogether.”

Or

“So we have 5 counters altogether, what is that 5 made up of?”

”Yes, a way to make 5 is with a 2 and a 3. I wonder if we can make it in different way?”

You will see from the timetable that PE will usually be on a Tuesday afternoon and that the children will be attending Thursday’s singing assembly in the hall with the rest of the school.

Things to work on at home this term

• The children have now gained independence in putting on their own coats, which is great. The next step is for them to learn to do zips/poppers . Please practise this at home and well done to the children already doing this.
• Please help your child to learn their address. This is a life skill and something that could be vital in an emergency.

General Reminders:

• Punctuality

We start lessons very promptly in the morning so please ensure that children arrive on time. We are seeing quite a lot of late arrivals!

Of course, we understand that occasionally circumstances may mean that a child is late but where children are late on a regular basis it is not only disruptive to the class but unsettling for the children coming in late, having missed a part of the session. Children who are late should come into school via the office where they will be registered and marked as ‘late’.

• Book bags and reading

All children should bring a named school blue book bag and their zip reading folder to school every day to ensure homework and letters can be sent out as necessary.

• Please ensure reading books and reading record book are in the zip reading folder and sent into school daily. Please listen to your child read every day or as often as possible and let us know how they are doing by regular comments in their reading diary. Reading is so important!
• Homework when given on paper, will usually go home on a Friday and should be returned on the following Monday or uploaded on to Tapestry. Please encourage your child to do as much of this homework independently as possible. Let us know if lots of support was needed. If a paper copy of homework is not given please see Tapestry for reading and writing activities.
• Uniform and equipment
• All children should have named water bottles. This should contain water.
• School uniform for our Foundation Stage –blue joggers, white polo shirt and blue school sweatshirt/cardigan. Shoes should be trainers that fasten with Velcro no laces please
• Every child needs a named pair of wellies in school, please. We should be going outside every day in Early Years but the garden is very wet and muddy so the children need wellies which will protect their shoes and prevent mud being trodden into the classroom. Children without wellies may not be able to go in the garden if it is too muddy.
• Waterproof coats.

PLEASE NAME EVERYTHING!

Toy fund

If you are able to donate £5 to our toy fund this would be very much appreciated but of course we understand that this may not be possible. We will be buying some more resources to support our ‘People who help us’ topic as well as some consumables for messy and malleable play. As you may know, school funding is unfortunately a nationwide issue so our  Monksmead classes are now compiling Amazon Wishlists, whereby parents can purchase resources specifically for their child’s class. If anyone is able to do this, we would be most grateful.

Thank you for your support. If you require any further information, please come and speak to either myself or a member of the Reception team.

Many Thanks,

Mrs Cornwell

Reception Timetable 

Phonics and Reading

Phonics

We follow a DfE validated systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme called Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS).

What is phonics?

Synthetic phonics is a way of teaching children to read. It teaches children how sounds are represented by written letters. Children are taught to read words by blending these sounds together to make words. For example, they will be taught that the letters ‘m-a-t’ blend together to make ‘mat’.

A synthetic phonics programme, such as ELS, provides a structure for teaching these sounds in a certain order to build up children’s learning gradually. It is used daily during Reception and Year 1 to teach all the sounds in the English language.

How is ELS taught in school?

With ELS, there is a daily phonics lesson where children are taught a new sound, or where they review sounds learned earlier in the week. This is shown to the class on the whiteboard.

Children learn the letters that represent the sounds. They are then asked to read words and sentences with the new sounds in. Children will also practise writing the letters that represent the sounds.

Additional support

ELS is delivered using a whole-class approach. This ensures that all children benefit from the full curriculum. Children who encounter difficulties are supported by the teacher throughout the lesson, and where further support is required, ELS has three interventions to ensure that any learning gaps are quickly filled. These are intended to be short and concise. This helps ensure that children do not spend excessive time outside of the classroom or in group intervention sessions where they are removed from the rest of the curriculum.

Assessment

It is important that children’s progress is assessed thoroughly, so that any gaps can quickly be identified.

Assessment of the children’s reading skills is key to ensuring that all children make rapid progress through the programme, and that they keep up rather than catch up.

We assess children’s phonic knowledge in the fifth week of each half term, to allow all members of staff to target and close any gaps that may be present in either sound knowledge or reading skills. By undertaking assessment in the fifth week we are able to action a direct intervention before any upcoming school holidays.

Decodable readers

It is vital that whilst children are learning to read, they read books that match their phonic knowledge. The Oxford University Press decodable readers support Essential Letters and Sounds and have been carefully matched to every aspect of the programme. We use these books in school and as take-home readers.

How can I help at home?

Practising the sounds

You can help your child practise the sounds they have been learning at school. Download the charts from the Oxford Owl for Home website so you can see the list of sounds in the order they’ll be taught: Essential Letters and Sounds - Oxford Owl You can show these to your child along with the picture to help them remember.

Reading decodable books

Your child will bring home reading books with words that use the sounds they have been learning in school. You may hear these reading books called ‘decodable books’. Use the prompts inside the front and back covers to enjoy the book together and help your child practise reading.

By reading and re-reading texts both in school and at home we offer children the opportunity to develop a cohesive orthographic map of the words within our language. This in turn helps to build their reading fluency. The more you can read at home with your child, the better. We ask that children read the decodable reader they bring home at least three times during the week.

You can find more information about ELS, including the order the sounds are taught in, on the Oxford Owl website: Essential Letters and Sounds - Oxford Owl

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Please click on the links below to see the sounds the children learn as part of ELS.

To support their love of reading, children will also be encouraged to choose a 'sharing book' - this is a book that may or may not be fully decodable but can be enjoyed with parents and family members as a book to read together.

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Topic Map - Spring Term 2026

'Real Life Heroes' 

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