Autumn Term 2023 

Ourselves and Celebrations.

Welcome to Reception at Hampton Hargate Primary School! Every term you will receive a curriculum statement outlining what your child will be learning about at school. 

Our topics this term will be ‘Ourselves’ and ‘Celebrations’. This has been written to highlight the activities we are carrying out in school this half term across the seven areas of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage. 

 Personal Social and Emotional Development 

In this area of learning we will be encouraging the children to be as independent as possible – looking after their own belongings including clothes, book bags and coats. We will introduce our reward systems to promote and reward good behaviour using mini merits, house points and stickers. This term we will be encouraging the children to get to know each other and develop a voice within circle times and whole class and group discussions. We will model how valuable conversations have a two-way response and support children to develop these key skills. They will have opportunities to talk about themselves in relation to their families and their new class and school community.  We will be encouraging them to manage their own feelings, to keep going when they meet challenges (to develop their resilience and perseverance) and to be considerate of other’s needs. We will use these ‘Topic’ areas to engage the children to share from their own experiences and join in with shared experiences in school such as (Diwali and Christmas).  

Communication and Language 

In this area of learning we will be encouraging the children to listen to the adults in the Reception unit and to also listen to their friends. We will be giving them opportunities to listen to and join in conversations with others.  Planned activities include continuing to introduce the children to new vocabulary linked to our topics and discussing the meaning of these new words. We will be encouraging the children to develop their listening skills, by giving them instructions that contain lots of different parts.  At the end of the day we always finish with a story, the children will be listening to stories written by familiar authors. We hope to encourage them to express their view about the events and characters in the stories and we will be asking them questions about why things happened in the stories. During our practice reading sessions the children will be taught how to retell stories using vocabulary linked to the books they have shared.  

 Literacy Development 

The children will begin our daily letter sounds in their daily phonic sessions. We will be introducing the begin phase of reading skills. Allowing children to state developing simple knowledge of letter sounds for reading and writing. We will be developing their confidence and independence when blending for reading and segmenting for writing. Through our continuous provision (both inside and outside) we will provide lots of exciting opportunities for the children to practise their skills. During our guided writing sessions, the Reception staff will be continuing to teach the children to write for a variety of purposes. This term we will be developing producing marks for a meaning, we will be refining pencil grip and fine motor control in order to become beginning writers. We will focus this term on writing our names and beginning to learn letter formation in our phonics sessions. This term we will be encouraging the children to read at home as much as they can to improve their reading skills. They will continue to read to an adult in the classroom at least once a week and they will be participating in practice reading sessions three times a week.

Mathematical Development  

In this area of learning we will be continuing with our daily maths session when we practice our skills of number recognition, ordering numbers and finding one more and one less than a given number and learning our number bonds to5. In our focused teaching and learning sessions will build on our knowledge of number concept to 10. We will explore what it is to say, recognise, touch count and manipulate numbers to 10. Wherever possible we will be linking mathematics to our topics, during ‘ourselves’ topic we will be completing work based around the story ‘Kippers birthday’ exploring numbers relating to our personal experience of birthdays. We will be introducing subitising to 5 and giving plenty of opportunity for the children to know and model how they know what numbers are.

 Understanding the world 

In this area of learning the children will go on autumn walks, exploring using all their senses. We will develop an understanding of our own bodies, labelling and investigating body parts. We will look at the differences and similarities between celebrations around the world and within different faiths. We will support the children to start to ask questions about the world around them and encourage an ethos of ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions from the children. We aim to enrich our understanding of the world with as many first-hand experiences as we can from walks in our local community to visit to our local church. We will use the changes of the seasons and exploit any natural weather opportunities to make autumn and winter have real meaning for our children. (From ice experiments to finding hibernation spots in our forest school.)

Expressive Arts and Design 

As part of this area of learning we provide daily provision for painting, drawing, collage and junk modelling. During teaching activities, we will be working with the children to make self-portraits and develop colour mixing skills with paint. A huge part of our autumn term focuses on song and joining in with daily songs in class to learning and performing in our school nativity. We will look at the work from Artist Andy Goldsworthy and create our own artwork using this inspiration.

 Physical Development 

We will continue to provide a wide range of activities this term both indoors and outdoors – to develop the children’s physical skills. To promote fine motor skills our provision includes cutting, tracing and threading activities. We will be encouraging the children to hold and use equipment correctly such as scissors, pencils and cutlery. We will be continuing with our daily formal letter formation sessions when we will be teaching the children to form their letter correctly. This term we will be encouraging the children to give all fine motor tasks a go independently. To promote gross motor skills our provision includes the use of bikes and scooters, bats, ball, hoops and large construction blocks in our outdoor area. We will introduce our formal PE lessons in the second half of the term, which will include simple movement skills and developing a sense of safety in physical activities.