Dear Parents and Carers,

Welcome to Reception! Here, you will find all the information you need about Reception at Ovingham CE First School.

Mrs Barber is our class teacher and we are lucky to have Miss Allen and Mrs Bell as our teaching assistants.

PE:

Our PE sessions are on a Wednesday and are delivered by the NUFC Foundation. Children come into school wearing their P.E kit for this session. This should be a school jumper, a white T-shirt and black shorts or jogging bottoms with trainers for outdoors. All uniform should be labelled, including coats, shoes and PE kits. This is very important as clothes do end up on the wrong bodies!

Water Bottles:

Children in Reception are provided with their own school water bottle at the start of the year. Water bottles will be sent home on a Friday and need to be returned the following Monday. Spare water bottles can be purchased from Mrs Burnip in the school office for £1.50.

Reading Books:

As your child begins their reading journey, they will start to bring home a reading book in line with their current reading ability. At the start of Reception these books are wordless or have very few words but are important to your child’s reading development. These books allow children to learn how stories work, including the order and direction in which they read, without the pressure of too many words on the page. Children will enjoy talking about the story and discussing what is happening in the pictures. The first step in reading is to use visual prompts to help read the words. The pictures provide lots of opportunities for playing with environmental sounds, an important first step in the teaching of phonics. As your child’s phonics knowledge and reading skills develop, they will receive a phonics-based book linked to the sounds taught in class, these books will then become levelled reading books according to their reading ability. In school we call this ‘My Book.’

On Mondays, children bring their book bags and diaries to school and are given a VIPERS focus question and two reading books to read at home throughout the week. These books are to be returned on Friday.

The two books are known as a ‘My Book’ and an ‘Our Book’. The ‘My Book’ is a book matched to your child’s phonics knowledge or a coloured level book. These books are used to boost your child’s fluency when reading aloud and encouraging them to segment and blend words. The ‘Our Book’ is a book that the children choose themselves from our class library. This should be read alongside an adult and aims to boost children’s interest and love of reading.

Outdoor Shoes: