Our first week of school

Date: 6th Sep 2024 @ 5:12pm

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.
• 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, used their manners, and enjoyed eating at the tables with their friends before taking their trays up to be scraped and sorted.
• Our class are 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.

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.

Yesterday, we were so very excited to have our first Forest School session with Mr Simmons, a shorter session than usual to also allow some time for choosing in the classroom. This session was a chance to explore our Forest School environment and start to learn the rules and routines of Forest School. The children impressed us as they tried to be as independent as possible when putting on their outdoor clothes and wellies. Please do ensure that wellies/school shoes/waterproofs are clearly labelled. It would also be useful to help your child practise putting their own coat on. We will, of course, always help them but will be encouraging children to have a go independently – a great skill to learn. We love this trick for anybody finding it a bit tricky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F7x2ad5upI Children are welcome to leave wellies on the welly stand and waterproofs in their trays/on their pegs.

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.

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 3pm 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 promises lots more fun and some activities to complete together, beginning with painting portraits to display in our classroom. We will also 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 teaching sounds in phonics sessions in the following week (week 3).

Tuesday shall be our PE slot and so we ask that children come to school in their PE kit on this day. On Thursday, we shall enjoy a whole morning of Forest School with Mr Simmons and Mrs McAree.

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

Mrs McAree and I have thoroughly enjoyed our first week and we look forward to watching the children flourish together as the year progresses. How lucky we are to be spending the year with such wonderful children! I hope that you enjoy lovely 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