Reception at South Gosforth First School

At South Gosforth First School, the EYFS curriculum is delivered through a balance of child initiated play based activities and adult led and supported tasks. Our Reception Unit covers two class bases, an Imagination Station for role play, storytelling and small world activities, a Creation Station for ‘messy’ activities and an outdoor area. The children are organised into two Registration groups but get plenty of time to learn and play together across both classes.

Each day, the children will have two Busy Play sessions. During these sessions, the children have the opportunity to choose where they would like to play in the Reception Unit and can move freely from one area to another. Both classes mix together so the children are able to form friendships across the whole unit.

Children in the EYFS learn by playing and exploring, being active, and through creative and critical thinking which takes place both indoors and outside. It is very important that they develop social skills, such as turn-taking, sharing and independence, which help them greatly in the next stages of their learning.

With this in mind, to help develop children’s problem solving, creativity and collaborative skills, we complete Play Project frameworks to enable children to lead their own learning through play. The children plan ideas for what they can make and create, draw, build and message related to our theme or a theme of their own choice.

At South Gosforth First School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers. Phonics teaching and learning are a key part of the Early Years Foundation Stage and help to develop both early reading and writing skills.

We teach phonics through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic, synthetic phonics programme. We start the teaching of phonics as soon as the children are full time in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. The sessions are delivered daily and build up from 10-minute lessons to 30 minutes. There are keep-up sessions following the phonics sessions for any children needing additional practice. Keep up sessions match the structure of the whole class session using the same procedures, resources, and vocabulary but in smaller steps with more repetition. These sessions are delivered by a Teaching Assistant or School Based Tutor. The children are assessed using the Little Wandle assessment documents every six weeks to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed. Teachers will also monitor progress and identify children who need additional support through ongoing daily assessments in class.

As part of the Little Wandle Programme, the children engage in three reading practice sessions a week. These sessions start as soon as the Little Wandle Phonics sessions begin in the Autumn Term, initially using wordless books. Each reading practice session is delivered by a trained teacher or teaching assistant and children use books which are matched to their secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments. The sessions have a clear focus, so that the demands of the sessions do not overload the child’s working memory. The sessions focus on one of the three key reading skills: decoding, prosody and comprehension. Following the three reading practice sessions in school, all pupils will read the same Collins Big Cat E-book at home to further develop their fluency and comprehension skills.

All pupils in Reception will have 1 further phonic reading book per week which is directly matched to the pupil’s individual phonic ability. This book will be selected from our school phonic reading scheme. Parents and carers are given a daily guide for how to support their child when reading their phonics book in order to develop confidence and fluency.

As well as group reading practice sessions, children who have been identified as needing extra support with reading in Reception are heard to read one to one with either their teacher or teaching assistant three times a week. There are extra opportunities for these children to also read one to one with a Reading Buddy volunteer.

We aim to instil a love of reading in every child. Throughout the day, there are repeated and prolonged opportunities for children to read books, share books and tell and retell stories, some of which may also be linked to current topics and themes and from our whole school reading spine. Teachers choose the texts that they share with children very carefully to ensure that they include high quality, ambitious vocabulary for pupils. Children will hear a range of stories and poems from a number of different authors, so that they can begin to develop a love of reading and express their opinions of the books that they are exposed to.

There are attractive story telling / role play areas in our Early Years unit with a range of books on display. Every week, pupils will have the opportunity to select a library book from our school library which they can take home and read in addition to their home school reading books. These could be fiction, non-fiction or poetry books.

At South Gosforth First School, we help our children develop as writers through direct teaching of writing and by providing lots of opportunities for them to practise their skills regularly right across the curriculum.

Before children start to ‘write’, we spend time developing the children’s gross motor skills. In order to develop gross motor skills, we do lots of ‘BIG’ activities with the children like ‘Squiggle Whilst you Wiggle’. Alongside gross motor skills, we then help the children to develop their fine motor skills and dexterity. In order to develop fine motor skills, we encourage the children to do mark making, use chalks, tweezers and pincers, thread on string, follow and overwrite on wavy lines and use play dough.

Teaching the children to form letters is the next step in the process of early writing and this is done as part of the phonics session which all of the children do every day. When the children learn a particular grapheme, they learn how to form it correctly through modelling by the teacher. Children also get lots of opportunities to do this through their busy play too through the enhancements which we put out for the children to use.

One of the teaching approaches which we use at South Gosforth First School is called ‘Talk for Writing’. This structured approach to the teaching of writing, involves the children learning simple story structures off by heart to ‘internalise’ them, creating story maps and then innovating them to write sentences for their own story.

Practical maths activities, number recognition and counting are incorporated into our daily routines in Reception. In addition to this, we deliver daily whole class maths sessions and weekly small group maths activities which are adapted to provide support and/or challenge appropriate for each group of children.

We use White Rose Maths progression and planning documents to plan activities which develop problem solving skills and provide challenge to prepare the children for Year One and the Key Stage One Curriculum. We also deliver the Mastering Number project which aims to secure firm foundations in the development of good number sense for all children in Reception and support them with developing fluency in calculation and a confidence and flexibility with number by the time they leave Key Stage 1.

Maths challenges linked to our learning are set out in our areas of continuous provision. Opportunities for active maths and problem-solving activities are provided through use of our outdoor area.

During the first six weeks of the children’s time in school, all children will be assessed using the new national Reception Baseline Assessment. This provides an on-entry baseline of pupil attainment and helps to inform teacher’s planning for the first half term.

Early Years practitioners are required to pursue daily rich activities to support each child’s educational development across the seven areas of learning. To plan for successful learning, we continuously observe children to identify their interests, explore how they learn, and monitor their progress in each area of learning and development. This progress is recorded on the school’s Insights tracker system at the end of each term.

In the final term of the year, a profile will be completed for each child to assess if the children have achieved the Early Learning Goals in these areas. This provides parents and carers, practitioners and teachers with a well-rounded picture of a child’s knowledge, understanding and abilities, their attainment against expected levels, and their readiness for Year 1. The children will be observed and assessed through their play and activities in order to gain insights and make reasonable judgements against the Early Learning Goals. We will use the terms ‘emerging’ (not yet reaching expected levels of development for age) or ‘expected’ (reached expected levels of development for age) to describe our judgements.

We believe that parents and carers are a child’s first educator and our partnership with parents means that families have the opportunity to work closely with our Early Years practitioners to support children’s transition into the setting and throughout their year in Reception. We would like parents to feel secure in the knowledge that their child is well cared for and happy at school.

Our parents are welcome to be actively involved in their child’s learning in school and are able to share learning experiences through ‘stay and play’ sessions, contributions to our online learning journey ‘Tapestry’ and parent/carer workshops. A Family Consultation Evening is held in the Autumn and Spring Term to discuss children’s progress. We value this time, not only to share and celebrate the children’s experiences at school, but also to hear from parents/carers and address any queries orconcerns.

We will be holding a number of Prospective Reception Parent & Carer Visits to school this academic year. These will be held on:

• Monday 16th of November 2026 - 4.30pm
• Thursday 19th of November 2026 - 4.30pm
• Wednesday 2nd of December 2026 - 9.30am
• Monday 7th of December 2027 - 9.30am
• Thursday 14th of January 2027 - 4.30pm

Please find our School Admissions Policy and a number of other useful documents and presentations in relation to Reception below: