Beech Grove Primary School
Autumn Term 2026
Head Teacher’s Message
Welcome back to our new Autumn term. On behalf of the staff, we would like to welcome you to a new school year and hope that 2026/2027 is just as brilliant as last year. It was wonderful to see our whole school community trying their very best for our children to try and reach their maximum potential. I am positive this year will be exactly the same.
Once again, I cannot thankyou enough for the tremendous efforts you went to during last year to support your children and the school. We should, as a school community be really proud of the way we continue to stick together and support one another.
I hope that you have all had the chance to relax and recharge your batteries during the summer holidays (wasn’t the weather just fabulous!) and are ready once more to attack the new school year with vigour and enthusiasm.
It is so important that our children attend regularly in order to continue to make the brilliant progress that they made last academic year. Our school attendance needs to be better! It is not acceptable to keep your child off for anything other than genuine illness and bereavement. Our school attendance will only get better with YOUR fantastic support.
I’m positive with your continued efforts, our excellent teaching and well-planned curriculum and interventions, our children will continue to achieve well and try their very best in all lessons.
After all my years at Beech Grove. I continue to be amazed by our children. I am so proud of them all and the way they have started back this Autumn term. The children’s continued resilience and adaptability is outstanding.
Our Next-Door Neighbour Qualities of Respect, Tolerance and Kindness shine through in their everyday school life. It is wonderful to see.
As always, our teachers have lots of interesting activities planned for this term and hope that you will enjoy hearing what children have been working on at consultation meetings, and will support them with their homework and reading outside of school. READING is the key to EVERYTHING and unlocking the children’s true potential! Please, please, please x10000000 encourage them as much as you can with their reading at home. It really is greatly appreciated by all staff.
John Dixon
English
In Reception the children will be following our Read Write Inc whole school phonics programme. This will be taught first thing on a morning and the children will learn a new sound every day. The children will begin to orally blend using “Fred Talk” (hearing separate sounds such as ‘c-a-t’ and being able to blend them together to hear the word ‘cat’). Look out for our Read Write Inc sounds practise sheets in your child’s book bag and Fred games on Seesaw, please do try to work on these with your child at home, to reinforce their learning.
In Reception we will be working on early writing skills such as good pencil grip, scissor skills, mark making and correctly forming our new Read Write Inc sounds each day. Children will practise writing their first name once they have learnt all of their single sounds. Your child will begin hearing and identifying the initial sound in words and as the term progresses begin writing CVC words, such as dog, using our ‘Fred Fingers’ (counting the sounds in a word and pinching their fingers to spell a word). In class we will be sharing a range of story books linked to our topics and children will begin to re-tell familiar stories themselves. We will engage in ‘Talk Through Stories’ every day, reading the same text once a day. This will allow the children to become familiar with the text and to also begin to learn new vocabulary.
Maths
In the first couple of weeks in Reception we will be carrying out a maths assessment to identify any gaps in the children’s number knowledge. We will ensure each child receives support to fill the gaps so that they are ready to access the Reception Maths Curriculum. We will be following the NCETM Mastering number programme, teaching the children to subitise (say ‘how many?’ without counting) to 5, compare numbers, count and begin to understand the composition of numbers to 5.
Topic
Our topic for Autumn 1 is ‘Do you want to be friends?’ –
As this is your child’s first half term in a new class, we will mainly be focusing on building relationships and making friendships. We will also begin to introduce new rules and routines, so that the children are aware of our expectations around behaviour and learning. We will explore this through stories such as ‘The Colour Monster’, ‘Meesha Makes Friends’. Children will spend lots of time playing alongside adults in ‘Busy time’ getting to know their new environment and getting to know the staff.
Our topic for Autumn 2 is ‘Where do squirrels hide their nuts?’–
This half term, we will explore the seasonal changes that happen in the natural world during the season Autumn. This will include an Autumn walk to Albert park, where we will collect autumn treasures and crunch through piles of autumn leaves, exploring We will also learn about woodland animals, discussing hibernation and how animals prepare for winter.
Safeguarding (What we are teaching children to help them keep safe)
During this term we will be talking to the children about keeping safe as the evenings get darker and keeping safe around fireworks.
Jigsaw- We will be introducing Jigsaw Jenie and teaching the children some calming techniques. Our topics will be Being Me in my World, where we talk about settling in to our new class and Celebrating Differences where we talk about being unique and special.
Dates for your Diary
Autumn Term: Tuesday 1st September 2026 – Friday 18th December 2026
Half Term: Monday 26th October 2026 – Friday 30th October 2026
Stay and Play Dates:
Wednesday 14th October 2026 Miss Roland
Thursday 15th October 2026 Miss Morrisey