Reception Curriculum

In reception our planning is informed by Development Matters.

We have created exciting themes to offer all children an irresistible invitation to learning! Every child will be enabled to achieve, ensuring rich and meaningful coverage of the new national curriculum.

Reception Curriculum Overview (pdf) see link below

We teach phonics using a variety of creative, fun and interactive resources to ensure the National Curriculum Programmes of Study (for word reading and spelling) are taught. Children learn to apply their phonic skills in all reading and writing across the curriculum.

In Reception, children at Alexandra are taught the sounds made by individual, pairs and clusters of letters. They read graded books with strongly patterned language and picture cues. In reception class and in Year 1, children have regular phonics sessions that assist them to recognise letters, understand the sound they make and blend these sounds together to create words. Letter-sound correspondence is taught through a highly structured synthetic phonic approach. Alongside this they learn to instantly recognise by sight the most common words in the English language. Many of these words are not phonically regular and it is important that they develop automation in their sight vocabulary. They see a word and instantly recognise it, without trying to sound it out. This automatic sight recognition of  common words is crucial, as they appear so regularly in all the texts they encounter.

We value the love of reading and develop children's skills needed to become fluent and lifelong readers. As well as high quality, rich and varied texts used to inspire and teach reading in class children are also supported with our home reader scheme which are linked to phases of letters and sounds; a mixture of fiction and non-fiction books by Floppy's Phonics, Oxford Reading Tree Songbirds and Traditional Tales and Collins Big Cat Phonics. 

The Reception team