Reception – Term 1, Week 5 – Henleaze Infant School

Key dates

Wednesday 1st October 2025 9am – 10am – Phonics learn-a-long and Curriculum meeting. Parents are invited to watch their children take part in a Phonics lesson. This will be followed by a curriculum meeting. There will be the opportunity to find out more about our curriculum and enable you to support your child to learn to read at home.
Wednesday 10th December 2025 – 9:30am Reception Nativity performance to parents/carers.

Noticeboard

Please provide your child with a PE kit by Monday 29th September 2025. This will stay on your child’s peg until the end of the term, when it will be sent home to be washed and returned at the beginning of the following term. Children do not need trainers until later in the year. Click here to see the uniform policy, which includes PE kits. Buttercup will usually do PE on Tuesdays and Daisy will usually do PE on Wednesdays.
Please make sure your child brings a coat with them every day.
When children are at school for full days, please provide them with a snack of fruit or vegetables (no crackers, breadsticks etc) in a named pot.
When dropping your child off at school in the morning, please make sure they do not play with the resources that have been carefully placed for learning later in the day.
On your way into/out of school, please do not let your child climb on and walk along the wall. Due to safety reasons, we cannot allow 30 children to walk on during the school day. It is really difficult for children to have two different sets of rules, therefore we ask that no children walk on the wall.

Tapestry

Thank you for creating your Tapestry accounts. We will add a couple of carefully selected observations to your child’s learning diary throughout the term. At the end of each term, all other observations will be released into your child’s learning diary.

All About Me Box

In the coming weeks, every child will have the opportunity to take home the class ‘All About Me Box’ for one night. We ask that adults at home support their child to fill it with some items listed below. We appreciate this may take some time to prepare, hence the advance warning.

Item	Examples
An item to enable them to talk about a past event in their own life.	A photo from their third birthday party.A fridge magnet bought on a holiday.
One or two printed family photos that we can keep and display in our classroom for the year.	N/A
An item that symbolises being part of a community or a family tradition.	A pair of ballet shoes if attending a regular class.An item used in a religious festival.
3 or 4 printed photos of themselves at different stages of their life.	1 baby photo, 1 toddler photo, 1 photo when they were 3 and a photo of their first day of school.
1 other thing they would like to share with the class.	If you are a bilingual family, a story book in another language. A favourite toy.A special item of clothing worn for a celebration.

Once the box is filled, they will bring it back to school the next working day and discuss the items with the class (with support from teachers). You may want to support your child by having a ‘practice run’. This activity will help to develop their speaking skills if presenting, and their listening, attention and understanding skills if in the audience. The aim of this activity is so that the class can find out more about every child. At the end of the day, the items (apart from the family photos) will be returned to you.

Key text

The objectives below will be covered over the four ‘Structured Story Times’ this week.

Vocabulary focus:	spy, cellar, hunting, wicked, den, mangle, coal, scuttle
At the end of the week, children will know:	The nursery rhymes from the story. The main events in Cinderella and The Three Bears. That the story is set in the past.
At the end of the week, children will be able to:	Identify rhyming pairs. Identify and name familiar characters. Share their opinions and reason about them.

Next week’s learning

Subject	This week’s learning objectives
Communication and language	Speaking (through All About Me box): Use language to organise, sequence and clarify thinking, ideas, feelings and events. Become increasingly aware of audience. Include relevant details to engage their audience. Listening, attention and understanding (through All About Me box): Understand questions such as who; why; when; where and how. Ask relevant questions or make relevant comments in relation to what they have heard.
Personal, Social and Emotional development	To understand why it is important to share and cooperate with others. To develop strategies to help when trying to share with others
Physical development	Write Dance and Disco Dough – To develop the gross and fine motor skills needed for writing. PE – To get changed into our PE kits independently. To stop safely and develop control when using equipment.
Phonics	To know the phonemes (sounds) g, o, c and k.
Reading	To blend words using known phonemes in phonics lessons. To say what the initial, middle and final sounds are in CVC words. To say how many phonemes there are in a word.
Writing	To draw a picture of my family and write my name.
Maths	To compare size – Look at objects and talk about which are big, small, tall, or short. To compare mass – Find out which things are heavy or light by guessing and testing. To compare capacity – See which containers hold more or less by filling and comparing them.
Understanding the World	History (through All About Me box): Talk about past and present events in their own life. Know about similarities and differences between themselves and others, and among families, communities, cultures and traditions. Geography and R+WV (through All About Me box): Talk about their immediate family and community and some of their routines, culture and celebrations. Recognise that people have different beliefs and celebrate special times in different ways. Name the street where their home and school are.
Expressive Arts and Design	To draw with increasing accuracy using and experimenting with coloured pencils, felt tips, chalk and crayon to represent their ideas.