WELCOME TO ACORN CLASS (Reception)
Teacher: Clare Clay and Becky Wood
Teaching Assistants: Sophie Baldry-Reynolds and Kirsty Wiles.
PE Days: Wednesday
All o
ur classes uses ClassDojo to keep in touch with parents. You will be able to contact your child’s teacher during the week using ClassDojo. Please contact the office on 01935 872430 for absences.
To Join our ClassDojo click here ClassDojo – Acorn Please note that we only use the free features of ClassDojo, so there is no need to subscribe or make any purchases.
At St Andrew’s we implore our parents to read with and to their children everyday. Being able to read opens the world of learning to us all. Therefore a love of stories, books and reading is of the highest importance to our children. It would really benefit your children if you regularly practice the phonic sounds and tricky words as we learn them.
Our curriculum is designed to provide pupils with a rich, coherent learning journey across all subjects. You can explore our Long-Term Plan—including the topics, subject coverage, key vocabulary and the core concepts we are teaching—by clicking here: Long term planning- Acorn.
To help families get to know the staff and understand classroom routines, expectations and learning priorities, we also share our Meet the Teacher presentation, available here: Meet the Teacher PowerPoint .
These resources offer a clear overview of what children will be learning and how we support them throughout the year.
Reception Parent Information
At St Andrew’s, we place great value on the development of children as individuals and providing them with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to prepare them for the challenges in Key Stage One and beyond. Our vision is to grow positive, well-rounded, confident individuals who aspire to achieve their full potential whilst showing kindness and compassion for themselves, each other, and the world around them. Effective teaching creates high-quality experiences in a stimulating and supportive environment, fostering good outcomes for pupils. Relationships are central to this, aligned with our ethos of ‘Love, Learn, Grow and Flourish.’ Through these principles, we aim to provide the best education for every child.
At St Andrew’s Primary School, we believe children learn most effectively when they engage in a rich, deep, and systematically planned curriculum that meets their diverse academic, social, and cultural needs. Our enabling environment and warm, skillful adult interactions support the children as they begin to link learning to their play and exploration. We maximise opportunities for meaningful cross-curricular links and learning experiences as well as promoting the unique child by offering extended periods of play and sustained thinking following children’s interests and ideas.
We ensure that we embed the right habits for learning through the Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning – Play and Exploration, Active Learning and Creative and Critical Thinking.
Play and Exploration:
Finding out and exploring
Playing with what they know
Being willing to ‘have a go’
Active Learning:
Being involved and concentrating
Keep trying
Enjoying achieving what they out to do
Creative and Critical Thinking:
Having their own ideas
Making links
Working with ideas
In addition, our curriculum covers the seven Areas of Learning that are detailed below.
Prime Areas:
– Communication and Language
– Physical Development
– Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Specific Areas:
– Literacy
– Mathematics
– Understanding the World
– Expressive Arts and Design
The Learning Environment
Pupils learn through a balance of child-initiated and adult-directed activities. The timetable is carefully structured so that children have directed teaching in English, maths and phonics. These sessions are followed by group work where children work with a member of staff to develop their individual targets. This focused group time means we can check for understanding, identify and respond to misconceptions quickly and provide real-time verbal feedback, which results in a strong impact on the acquisition of new learning.
Children are provided with plenty of time to engage in ‘exploration’ throughout the variety of experiences carefully planned to engage and challenge them in the provision. The curriculum is planned for the inside and outside and equal importance is given to learning in both areas. The curriculum is planned in a cross-curricular way to enable all aspects of the children’s development including understanding the world and expressive art and design as well as to promote sustained thinking and active learning.
The continuous provision (the areas and resources for children to interact with) is linked to the needs and interests of the children in our setting. It provides familiar areas for them to explore so, enhancing as children’s learning progresses.
Provision can be enhanced in a variety of ways:
– Children’s interest
– Theme or topic
– Skill (such as joining, printing, cutting etc)
– Basic Skills (elements of Literacy and Numeracy)
– Direct challenge
Common Play Behaviours
Common play behaviours are the skills/equipment we might see children use in the different areas during continuous provision. They are skills the children do in that area without an adult present We then need to think about what we want to put into our areas to challenge that play behaviour.
We also need to think about levelling that skill so that a range of children can access that skill at their developmental level.
The progression of skills for children, along with key vocabulary, can be found here: Reception-Skills-Development-Progression-with-ELG and vocabulary.
One of our main aims is to develop a love of reading from a young age. We follow Unlocking Letters and Sounds (ULS) as a scheme and also ensure that children have plenty of opportunities to listen, read and retell stories. This in turn supports children’s speech and vocabulary development. In Maths, we follow White Rose, which allows us to spend time immersing children in each number and developing key skills, which they will use throughout their school life.
Our curriculum and its delivery ensure that all children make good progress including our disadvantaged and those with SEND. Our children grow into confident learners who are ready for their next challenge. We have high standards and our ongoing assessments mean that we are meeting the needs of all children through a rich varied curriculum leading to positive, well-rounded, confident individuals.