Hello Parents and Carers, 

My name is Miss Clarke and I have the pleasure of teaching the beautiful Reception Class this year. With the help of Miss Conway and Miss S, we will help your children grow and thrive throughout the year. 

This page will be updated each week throughout our learning journey so please keep an eye out for our posts!

We can't wait to see what this year brings us!

Thank you, 

Miss Clarke 

Dear Parents and Carers,

This year we will be using the Early Learning Goals framework to inform the learning taking place in the classroom. The topics for each term reflect chosen texts and learning goals that will be assessed. 

The yearly plan has been uploaded here for you to refer to throughout the year. 

Thank you, 

Miss Clarke

Pope Francis Jubilee 2025 – Pilgrims of Hope

As part of the celebrations for Pope Francis' Jubilee 2025, the theme for this year is ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. In light of the challenges facing the world today, such as the impacts of war, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the climate crisis, we are inspired to take an action by showing hope and solidarity.

In line with this, each class at Our Lady of Lourdes is choosing a charity to support throughout the year.

Our Reception class has chosen to support Kids Out, a charity that is dedicated to supporting some of the UK’s most disadvantaged and vulnerable children with positive and happy experiences.

Throughout the year, we will:

• Raise awareness about the charity.
• Organise fundraising activities to support its work.

We encourage you to visit our class webpage for updates on our activities and progress. We deeply appreciate your continued support as we work together to make a meaningful difference this year.

Thank you for your support of our Jubilee 2025 Pilgrims of Hope Charity Drive!

Warm regards,

Reception Team

This week, we had a fantastic time learning about height and length through hands-on building challenges! We constructed tall and short towers, using the words taller, shorter, highest, and lowest to describe our creations. Our little engineers also built rafts using long and short wooden pieces, testing which ones would help us float best along a river—lots of great problem-solving in action!

Our storytelling came to life as we retold Rumble in the Jungle using the book and puppets, bringing the jungle animals' adventures into our classroom. We also got creative with our hands—literally! We painted elephants using our handprints, making a wonderful, colourful display.

To build our reading and writing skills, we traced our Gold words in sand, helping us spell and read them in a fun and sensory way. It’s been an exciting, hands-on learning journey this week!

We had a fantastic time celebrating World Book Day by dressing up as our favourite book characters and participating in a workshop where we brought The Gingerbread Man to life through dance. We also explored art by creating lions and giraffes inspired by Giraffes Can’t Dance, and practiced our writing by describing Gerald the Giraffe’s body parts. It was a day filled with creativity, movement, and fun, as we celebrated the magic of books and learning together!

This week, we explored giraffe body parts through Giraffes Can’t Dance and discovered animal life cycles, from tiny eggs to hopping frogs! In math, we made speckled frogs, using rhyme and song to learn number composition. A fun-filled week of hands-on learning—bring on the next adventure!

Reaching the 100th day of school is a big milestone, and what better way to celebrate than by stepping into the future—literally! Our students had a blast dressing up as 100-year-olds, complete with grey wigs, walking sticks, and suspenders.

The day was filled with exciting activities, from counting to 100 in different ways to reflecting on everything we’ve learned so far. We also had a "100-Year-Old Wisdom" session where the little centenarians shared their thoughts on what life might be like at 100.

This fun and engaging celebration reminded us how far we've come and how much we can achieve when we keep learning, growing, and having fun along the way! Here's to the next 100 days! 🎉🎓

This Children’s Mental Health Week, we explored "Know Yourself, Grow Yourself" through counting and creativity! Using connective blocks, the children built towers to count to ten, noticing how each number is one more than the last.

We also dressed as our true selves, celebrating individuality and self-expression. Just like our number towers, we’re all growing and building every day! 🌱✨

We’ve had a magical and exciting week full of creativity, learning, and fun! 

🧪 Potion Making – Our little wizards and witches had a fantastic time mixing ingredients to create their own potions, just like in our story adventures!

🧘‍♀️ Yoga Lessons – We stretched, balanced, and found our calm with relaxing yoga sessions. A great way to start our day feeling refreshed and focused!

🎨 Painting Fun – We explored colours and textures, creating beautiful artwork that expressed our creativity.

✍️ Writing About ‘Room on the Broom’ – The students wrote sentences describing the characters from Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson. It was wonderful to see their thoughts and storytelling skills come to life!

🎲 Maths Games – Learning numbers and problem-solving through interactive games made maths so much fun!

🏡 Who is in Our Community? – We talked about our families, friends, and the important people in our community. This helped us understand how we all work together to support each other.

We’re so proud of all the children for their enthusiasm and creativity this week! 

This week in class, we’ve been busy exploring Maths Week with fun activities focused on patterns and numbers, including a special Number Day! 🎉

In literacy, we’ve been working on writing sentences and learning how to identify the who, what, and where in each sentence. This helps build a strong foundation for understanding and creating stories. 📝

The children have shown wonderful creativity and enthusiasm in their learning! Thank you for your continued support at home—it makes all the difference. 💛

This week has been full of creativity and learning! The children have been thrilled to explore our brand-new sandpit, using it to build magnificent castles while developing their fine motor skills and imaginative play.

We’ve also started writing simple sentences, and it’s wonderful to see the progress as the children confidently put their ideas onto paper. Adding to the fun, role-playing with characters from Zog has brought the story to life, encouraging teamwork and storytelling.

A big congratulations to our awardees for their fantastic efforts and achievements – we’re so proud of you!

Here’s to another week of learning adventures!

Over the Christmas break, our students got creative by making their very own dragons, inspired by our focus text, Zog by Julia Donaldson. This activity encouraged them to explore imaginative storytelling and develop their sentence-writing skills, bringing their dragons to life through words and creativity.

This week the children had a festive and fun-filled day making salt dough Christmas ornaments, shaping and decorating them with creativity and care. We shared a cosy Christmas lunch together, filled with laughter and the joy of the season. To top it all off, Santa made a surprise visit, bringing smiles and a touch of magic as he listened to Christmas wishes and handed out small gifts. It was a truly heart warming day to kick off the holiday spirit!

We hope you all have a safe and joy filled holidays. Can't wait to see you next year! 

The Reception class has been working diligently to prepare for their Nativity performance. On Friday, we had the wonderful opportunity to present it to our families, who were amazed by how clearly we delivered our lines and how beautifully we sang the songs.

We thoroughly enjoyed learning about the story of Christmas and are incredibly proud of the effort we put into making our performance shine!

No Pens Day was a whirlwind of creativity and fun as we explored hands-on activities that brought learning to life! The children loved role-playing a woodland picnic, using their imaginations to take on different roles and develop social skills. They painted vibrant characters from Little Red Riding Hood, combining storytelling with art, and created colorful number blocks, building towers while exploring counting and early math concepts. This day reminded us how powerful play and creativity are in fostering engagement and learning without a pen in sight!

This week, we had so much fun in the reading corner, retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood with puppets and props. We also learned about the shepherds who visited baby Jesus, exploring their important role in the Nativity story. In math, we practiced recognising and working with amounts of 3, using games and hands-on activities to make learning exciting! To top it all off, we enjoyed a special pyjama day, making our week extra cosy and fun.

This week has been a week of meaningful and engaging activities. For Remembrance Day, children created poppy crafts, participated in discussions about kindness and bravery, and observed a moment of silence. They explored The Gruffalo through storytelling, sequencing events, and dramatic play, bringing the woodland tale to life. During Continents Day, students and staff celebrated diversity by dressing in cultural clothing, exploring music, crafts, and traditions from around the world, and learning about the beauty of our global community. These activities have inspired curiosity, creativity, and a deeper appreciation for the world and each other.

Outdoor play is one of our favourite time of day! We love to develop our gross motor skills by climbing up and down the climbing frame, playing floor is lava and jumping from plank to plank, and making muddy treats in mud kitchen. 

This week we kicked off our learning by having a theme day focusing on "Into the Woods". Students dressed up as characters from our favourite woodland books such as Little Red Riding hood, The Gruffalo and so much more! The students loved using our loose parts play to construct a jet that took them to the beach where they surfed in the waves. Once they were finished, they jumped back in the jet to fly home!

This week we celebrated Our Lady of Lourdes 50th Birthday! To commemorate this momentous occasion all classes were allocated a decade. We dressed up as if we were living in the 2010's! We had a birthday dance party to popular song from the 2010's and made birthday hats! 

We’ve been having so much fun in the classroom with some amazing hands-on activities! The kids have been exploring mark making, expressing their creativity through drawings and colourful art while also building early writing skills. They’ve also been hard at work building forts, using their imaginations and learning teamwork and problem-solving. Numbers are popping up everywhere as the students practice counting and recognising them in playful ways. We’ve been especially excited to see them practice writing their own names! They’re learning letter sounds through Read Write Inc., taking those important first steps toward reading. It’s been wonderful watching them learn and grow through all this playful exploration!

This week we have been focusing on mark making! We began learning how to Fred Talk CVC words to be able to write them. Along with learning how to form letters, we have used a range of materials to help us mark make. This helps us to develop skills that will help us with our writing!

 Using scales, we filled the buckets with light and heavy objects to compare their weights. 

In Religion this week, we learnt that God created the world and us. He created us in His own image and knew that we are good. This means, we are all part of God's family and need to take care of each other. 

We explored what family means and what it looks like in our homes. Home corner is a very popular part of our classroom where students role play a range of family dynamics. 

This week, we have been learning how to write our names by creating name trains. We also got to meet our year 6 buddies that will join us for lunch every Friday and come and read to us in the afternoon. Friday's are always so much fun! 

What a busy week in Reception!

This week we learnt about the letters "m" and "a"! We worked on our letter formation my finger painting the letters and now they are displayed on our phonics wall. 

We celebrated our first birthday of the year and played some math games with each other. Miss Clarke was so impressed with the teamwork and sharing skills that she saw throughout the week! 

Well we had the best first week of Reception! It was full of fun and excitement as we settled ourselves into the routines and transitions at Our Lady of Lourdes! We shared our special items that we chose over the summer holidays and got to know each other. Spiderman even came for a visit! Can't wait to see what next week brings.