Guiseley Primary School

Reception Class

Useful documents

Reception class Brochure

Curriculum Overview Reception

Class Termly Newsletters

Autumn 2025

Spring 2026

Summer 2026

Summer Term 2026

The children have loved their last term in Reception and their first full year in school.

We enjoyed retelling the story 'The Three Little Pigs' and visiting Hesketh Farm. We found out about different animals on the farm and the jobs the farmer does every day. We even helped to milk the calves and lambs. This inspired us to write stories using the book 'What the lady bird heard. We had lots of fun sharing this with our families in our class assemblies. We did lots of gardening and grew our own vegetables and wild flowers.

We loved exploring how tadpoles change into frogs and finding out facts about their life cycle. We liked listening to the story ' The Tadpole's promise' and writing about the characters in the story.

The children enjoyed exploring about sea creatures and how plastic pollution can hurt the animals and their environment where they live. We found about about sea turtles and then enjoyed writing facts that had learned.

In phonics the children have now learned more phonemes and they are all gaining greater confidence blending and segmenting new words.

The children were fascinated to find out about pirates. We looked at how old ships would move without an engine and compare them to ships we have today. We had lots of fun dressing up as a character from Peter Pan and learning pirate language for the day. We even made Pirate Punch ' strawberry and banana smoothies and 'healthy chips' using the potatoes we had grown in our school garden. Yum yum!

What an amazing action packed year! Well done Reception children, we are really proud of you and know that you are all ready to start your journey into Year 1!

Spring Term 2026

The children have enjoyed a range of exciting learning experiences. We have found out about animals that live in the Arctic and in Antarctica and thought how we can help stop the ice from melting. We have enjoyed finding out about the festivals Chinese New Yea, Eid and Easter and how they are celebrated. The children looked at different people's jobs that help us such as vets, nurses, doctors, firefighters and the police. We invited parents and visitors in to school to talk about their jobs and we enjoyed practicing to apply bandages and sit in a police car! Next we found out about superheroes in particularly 'Supertato' and we explored why fruit and vegetables are healthy to eat.

The children are becoming independent readers and writers, using their phonic skills to decode new words. We have loved applying our writing skills in Drawing Club to write sentences about characters from the books we are reading such as the Evil Pea from 'Supertato' or a Bee in the 'Giant Jam sandwich'. The children love to bring these experiences to life and learned how to make pea soup and their own jam sandwiches.

In Science week we did lots of investigations finding out what happens to crayons when they melt, which items are magnetic, how we know dinosaurs lived long ago and even how to grow our own potatoes.

On World Book day we enjoyed dressing up as characters from stories we enjoy to read. We had lots of fun going on a book hunt and listening to a story read to us by our Year 6 Buddies.

In Maths we have deepened our understanding of numbers to 10 and explored measuring height, weight and capacity.

What a fun term!

Autumn Term 2025

At the start of the year the children have loved starting school and particularly enjoyed making new friends and exploring their new classrooms, our outdoor area ( called the Quad) and the rest of school. Each child has a Y6 Buddy who has helped the Reception children settle into school life.

We have started to learn how to read using our phonics scheme 'Rocket Phonics'. We use our blending arm to try to read words and our segmenting fingers to begin to spell simple words such as cat or mop. We are all excited to have our own reading books to share with our grown ups at home.

We have enjoyed watching the seasons change: going on an Autumn walk and looking closely at the Autumn treasures we found. We have been learning about colour mixing and printing with leaves and conkers. We had such a fun afternoon rolling pumpkins in our teams. We had to work out how to get the pumpkins to roll quickly - without kicking them! We read the story 'Pumpkin soup' and have enjoyed chopping up vegetables including pumpkins and creating our own healthy soup.

We have read many stories including 'The dot', in which we created painting inspired by dots and looked how if you keep trying you can achieve your goals. We found out about the festival Diwali and we enjoyed making puppets, Diva lamps and Rangoli patterns. We listened to the story ' The Colour Monster' and we worked hard to think how we can manage our own emotions. The children looked at the 'Zones of Regulation'. We added things to help us in our calm area such as breathing techniques, blankets and fidget toys.

The children loved finding out information about hedgehogs, this inspired some of our outdoor learning, making our own hedgehog houses. We have learnt some facts about hedgehogs and we used clay to make our own hedgehogs, adding details such as spikes and eyes.

We have had lots of fun learning about the Gingerbread man. It helped us write small words and begin to explore writing simple sentences. The children enjoyed acting out the story and designing and baking their own gingerbread people. We then listened to the story stick man and thought carefully about the rhyming words in the story. We made our own stick people outside using natural resources.

We have enjoyed celebrating many festivals including Children in Need, Odd Socks day, Bonfire night, Remembrance day and Christmas. The children have worked really hard to perform amazing songs, dances and actions in our Nativity show ' It's a Baby!' The children were really proud how their parents and grandparents could hear their voices right at the back of the hall.

We can not wait for another exciting adventure in 2026.

Summer 2025

We have had a fantastic half term and cannot believe that it is nearly the end of the year. You have made us proud every day.

During Science Week this half term, our project was to design and make our own pirate ship. The ship has to float and hold a pirate. The children had lots of exciting ideas using a range of material- boxes, plastic tubs, tin foil, lolly pop sticks glued together, Duplo and Stickle bricks. We had lots of fun testing them in our new water tray and seeing which material and shape made the best ship.

In maths, we have looked at grouping and sharing objects. We also explored patterns, looking at how we could continue a repeating pattern and which part is repeated - the 'rule'. We did this using objects such as red apple, yellow banana, red apple, yellow banana. We call this an AB pattern. We made more complicated patterns using three objects called an ABC pattern such as circle, square. triangle, circle square, triangle. We also created our own patterns for our friends to continue using our body parts, clap, knees, head, clap, knees, head.

In art we used the technique of tearing paper to create coastline scenes. We looked at local artists and photos of Scarborough to inspire us. We shared some of our work to a local art exhibition.

Some of of our work this half term been about life on or under the water, we have talked about pollution in the sea. We read the story 'Clean up' and discussed what we can do to stop the sea creatures getting hurt. The children helped to litter pick the rubbish on our tuff tray beaches and coastline, using tweezers.

Our Peter Pan day, on 12^th July was a big hit! We went on a treasure hunt and spent the morning in Pirate School.