Starting School

Our Reception area consists of 2 classrooms and outdoor area. The children will have the opportunity to access the 3 main areas during the day, so that they are able to access a range of resources and experience a variety of opportunities.

In Reception, the children also have access to a variety of areas in school including the playground and field, the hall, library and studio.

You have the option to apply for free school meals for your child, whilst they are in Reception. Our lunches are provided by a company called Good Lookin’ Cookin’, who provide a range of high quality food. Alternatively, you may provide your child with their own lunch box from home. If you are providing a lunch box, please note that we encourage healthy eating. Please ensure that there are no nut based products sent, including peanut butter and Nutella as we have children in school that would have an allergic reaction to this.

Your child can bring a snack into school to eat during their morning break time. This will need to be a healthy snack and can include fruit, cereal bars, raisins etc. Snacks such as chocolate, crisps or anything nut based will not be permitted, and will be sent home again with your child.

We ask that your child brings a named water bottle to school. We encourage water only, although juice or squash can be drunk with their lunch. Water bottles can be refilled if required.

We would strongly encourage you to try school meals at the beginning of the year. Once children are in school, we introduce them to a range of foods and different tastes and often find that they want to eat the same things as their peers. If you feel that your child is still not eating enough lunch each day, you can send them in with a lunch box from home. It is interesting, that children will often eat things with their friends that they would not normally eat at home. So it is worth trying to take advantage of this.

Your child will come into school for their two initial visits, before September. They will not be allocated a class for these visits. During these sessions they will spend time with the whole year group to enable them to build relationships with every adult that works in Reception. At the end of the second visit, your child will have been allocated a class and this information will be sent home via email.

If your child is not yet toilet trained, do not worry, but do what you can to support them to be in the best possible place to start school. Over the summer, continue to work on training strategies at home, building up their independence and encouraging them to be ‘school ready’. At school, we have a range of strategies to encourage independent toileting. We ensure regular toilet timings so that all children go regularly throughout the day, and they can also go to the toilet when they need to, outside of these times.

We ask that all children bring a spare set of clothing with them, so that if they do have an accident we can ensure that they have dry, clean clothes to wear.

The beginning of the Reception year is used as a settling in period and we will be completing a baseline assessment of each child’s knowledge, skills and capabilities across all of the developmental areas. Once these baselines have taken place, we then adapt our provision to provide learning experiences and challenges that are targeted at the children’s abilities and developmental needs.

Your child will need to bring a PE kit into school every week. This includes kit for both warmer and cooler temperatures. You can also find our uniform policy in your welcome pack, which details the PE kit. It is important that all items in your child’s PE kit and clothing are named, so that they can be returned to the correct child. There is always the risk that unnamed items may go home in another child’s bag and be lost.

The children get changed for a PE afternoon once a week, however this is not the only time that they work on their gross motor and movement skills. They have a wide range of opportunities to develop their skills, through using the outdoor environment, dancing and a variety of educational songs.

Once your child starts you will receive messages via email and text. In addition you will be able to access information about their learning on ‘Tapestry’. General information can be found on our website and for the latest news and updates, follow us on Facebook.

We also update these FAQs with useful hints and tips as they are received.