Our first week of school w/b 4.9.23

Date: 8th Sep 2023 @ 4:52pm

It has been a complete and utter delight to welcome our wonderful Reception class to Brereton Primary School. We are so proud of how confidently the children have settled into routines and how beautifully they have played together as wonderful friendships begin to blossom. It has been a truly wonderful week.

This week, our focus has been ensuring that the children feel settled and secure at school. We have therefore allowed lots of time for children to explore their environment and choose their own activities, demonstrating their interests and things they enjoy doing at home. We have concentrated on establishing routines, including:

• Putting our things away in the morning. Next week, we will start to introduce ‘soft start’ early morning activities.
• Taking the register, including choosing our snack and lunch. The children have thoroughly impressed us all with their beautiful manners during this time (and throughout the day!).
• Using the bathrooms and washing our hands properly before eating. The children know that they can access the toilets and their water bottles at any time. We have then enjoyed sitting in a circle for ‘snack and chat’ and it has been so lovely to listen in to some of the conversations between the children during this time.
• The children have amazed us with their confidence and independence when eating lunch in the hall. They have lined up beautifully, demonstrated their impeccable manners, and enjoyed eating at the tables with their friends before taking their trays up to be scraped and sorted.
• Our class are simply amazing at tidying up! We have learnt to “choose it, use it, put it away” and children can regularly be heard repeating this phrase around the environment. Our classroom is still looking beautiful on a Friday afternoon – such an achievement thanks to such helpful children.
• Collecting all of our things for home time, including how best to pack our things away so that we can easily carry them!

Wow, what a lot of new information to learn! I am sure you can understand why we are therefore so very impressed with how quickly and confidently these routines have been absorbed. This is absolutely fantastic and will set us up wonderfully for a great year with lots of familiar routine and smooth transitions. 

This week, we have spent lots of time getting to know the areas of the classroom in order to understand the continuous provision which will be here all year. This familiarity will allow us to soon enhance the areas. Once we feel familiar with the areas we have explored, some new areas will be revealed, including a themed role play and an outdoor reading/writing shed.

We have also enjoyed time on our ‘Trim Trail’ and learning the boundary for this area. We will be ready for lunchtime play on the Trim Trail beginning next week.

Our focus activity for this week was painting self-portraits, ready to be displayed proudly in the classroom. The children used mirrors to help them to draw and then paint their faces, and these look just beautiful.

Our week concluded with a celebration assembly. The rest of the school thoroughly enjoyed the chance to welcome the new cohort and it has been lovely to see children chatting to each other in the hall and at playtimes.

To commemorate our first week of school, we each took a photograph (although some of us did this a little later due to feeling rather hot and sweaty by the end of Wednesday morning!). We will use photographs of our faces to add to our self-registration 5 frames – a new morning routine to be introduced next week.

It has been an exciting and busy week and I am sure that the children were very tired this afternoon. They have done ever so well and have certainly earned a rest! Next week, the children will begin full days in school and so will finish at the same time as Key Stage 1 (between 3:05pm and 3:20pm). This week is usually the hardest for the children and they become very tired but please be assured that we will be taking things easy and having time for quiet moments with cushions and blankets if needed. If you feel that your child would benefit from a more staggered transition, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Next week, we will begin our baseline activities, showing us children’s existing knowledge of number, letters, sounds and language as well as their fine motor skills, including pencil grip. This will help us to plan our work going forwards so that we can best support all of the children. We will then be able to begin phonics teaching in the following week (week 3).

Next week will also bring our first Forest School and PE sessions of the year. Please ensure that children come to school with their wellies, waterproofs and a weather appropriate coat where necessary on our Forest School day (Tuesday) and that they come to school in their PE kit on Wednesday. Wellies and waterproofs can be left on our welly stand.

If you have any further queries, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. If you have not already done so, please connect to Dojo as I use this platform to regularly keep in touch.

All of the team have thoroughly enjoyed our first week and we look forward to watching the children flourish together as the year progresses. I hope that you enjoy a wonderful weekend (with lots of rest!) and we shall look forward to seeing you all on Monday morning.

With many thanks and best wishes,

Miss Witham