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Applying for a Reception school place 2026

Applications for a Reception place for September 2026 can be made from 01 November 2025 until 15 January 2026.

You will receive your child’s school offer on National Offer Day, April 16, 2026. Ensure you use your child’s permanent address when applying, as this is a key factor in the admissions process. 

If you’d like to come and look around our school, the next open sessions are on Tuesday 04 November at 6pm and Friday 21 November at 1.30pm. No need to book just turn up!

Please remember that you still need to apply for a Reception place even if your child attends Scholes (Elmet) Nursery.

“I can do it”

One of the Prime Areas of learning in Early Years is Personnel, Social and Emotional Development, so learning to take care of ourselves is very much part of our curriculum. This half term we have been working very hard at this. Encouraging the children to put on their coats and fasten them up independently. They are all doing so well and are showing fantastic resilience.  Trying again when they cant always manage it first time.

Changing from wellies to shoes is something that we do many times throughout the day. Pushing your foot into your shoes can be tricky and can take lots of practice.

We have had quite a few coughs and colds this week so our ” nose blowing area” has had lots of use. Getting a tissue and looking in the mirror to check that your nose is clean helps to develop independence.

Help at home  : You can help at home to develop these essential skills. Perhaps on a weekend, when popping out, you could support your child to put on their own coat and shoes.  We can’t wait to hear how you get on and more calls of ” I can do it”  in nursery.

Next week: we will be continuing to enjoy Julia Donaldson’s Room on the Broom. We have been joining in with the story adding our own actions to various parts.

” The witch tapped her broomstick and whoosh they were gone”

As it is the last week of our very first half term we will be rehearsing the Nursery rhymes that we have covered so far. We are sure that the children would love to recite these at home to you all.

Baa baa Black Sheep

Humpty Dumpty

Incy Wincy Spider.

Reminders 

I’m looking forward to meeting with you all next week  for our first parent teacher consultations. If you haven’t managed to book an appointment contact the school office.

Nursery closes for half term on Thursday 23 October.

We will return to Nursery on Monday 03 November

Democracy -3,4C

This week, our Living and Learning statement is ‘I take part in democratic decisions’.

In class, the children had time to discuss and consider what makes a good leader, why people should vote for them and what changes they would make. The children then had time to create their speech if they wished to be considered as the Junior Leadership Team representative for 3,4C.

Yesterday, the children enjoyed voting in the hall using the ballot box.

Well done to all the candidates that took part. We are really proud of you.

Working together.

Thanks to everyone who brought in Autumn treasures. We shared our final few this week. So many interesting things pumpkins, conkers and acorns. We have really enjoyed sharing their contents and finding out all about them.

Using them all we created a display to explore together.  Magnifying glasses helped us to look closely,

“The pine cone looks big”

“I see lines on the leaf”

The artist, Andy Goldsworthy inspired our autumnal creative work this week. We worked together to create a spiral pattern of conkers, pine cones and leaves.

Our interest in autumn has helped us to develop our fine motor skills too. This is the development of the muscles in the fingers. This will help us to develop an effective pencil grip.

We  balanced conkers and fir cones on up- turned cups. Used tongs to add conkers to our recipes in the mud kitchen. Then caught leaves with tongs in the water tray.

Why not try this at home ? Use old kitchen tongs or pegs to pick up the leaves in your garden or at the park. Let us know how you get on.

We always enjoy watching the children lead their own learning in nursery. This happens when they develop their own activities. Last week they used the hoops and decided to collect objects from around the outdoor provision that matched the colours of the hoops. Leaves, bricks, pens, flowers and cars were all placed into colour sets.

They then found orange flowers and  pink bricks, but there weren’t any orange or pink hoops. What to do?  They found some coloured paper and completed the sets. Lots of mathematical talk, co operation and team work. Super learning nursery.

Next week’s learning

Our story next week is  Room on the Broom, it’s written by the very popular author, Julia Donaldson.  You may be familiar with the story from the BBC version. You can watch it on BBC iplayer

Our Nursery Rhyme of the week is Incy Wincey Spider Can you sing this at home?

A few reminders

• Parent Teacher consultations – Please don’t forget to sign up for these 10 minute appointments. This is an opportunity to find out how your child has settled into nursery. It’s on zoom this time, the next meetings will be in person.
• We still need your family photos. The children are really enjoying talking about their special people and seeing their photos in our home area each day.

Dinosaurs

As the children continue to explore the provision lots of different interests have been emerging, this week it has been dinosaurs. We’ve developed a small world dinosaur land to encourage creative play and communication.

“This dinosaurs says roar”

” my dinosaur has sharp teeth”

We enjoyed using the ramps last week. This week we used them to roll some of the apples and conkers that we found in the nursery garden. We counted them as they reached the bottom.

We experimented with other things that roll too. In the paint this week we tried our hand at painting with rollers. This up and down motion will help us later when it comes to developing our skills as a writer.

Next week, we’ll talk about the changes that we are noticing outside.  Look out for a brown bag in your child’s folder – we’d like you to fill it with autumn treasure that you find and return it to Nursery.

Our focus story  is the popular story “We’re Going on a bear Hunt” We will be exploring this story using our own puppets and props.

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt   – watch the story hear told by Michael Rosen.

Our Nursery Rhyme of the week will be Baa Baa Black Sheep. Listen to the rhyme together here

Reminders:

• • Please don’t forget to send a family photograph for our home corner display Please send it to scholesnursery@spherefederation.org 
  • We play outside in all weather – please remember to send your child with a waterproof coat every day.

The Great Big Book Of Families

This week we’ve been reading  The Great Big Book of Families.  (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.)  Through the book, we have explored and celebrated the variety of families. In the writing area, we drew our families and we used loose parts to make the faces of people in our families.

Help at home: Photos 

Thank you for sending your family photos. There’s still time to email one if you haven’t had the chance yet.  Over the next few weeks, we will also be thinking about our homes. To help support our discussions, please send in one picture of your front door.  You can email photos to scholesreception@spherefederation.org

Phonics

This week, we have learnt the phonemes (the sounds a letter makes) i, n, m and d.

The children have learnt how to identify the sounds by their graphemes and how to form the graphemes in their writing. They have practised identifying initial sounds and blending sounds together to say the whole word.

We have introduced new vocabulary linked to our phonics learning:

Phoneme– The sound a letter (grapheme) makes

Grapheme– The letter that represents the sound

Segmenting- Breaking up a word into its phonemes and sounding aloud (ie. cat becomes c-a-t)

Blending- Blending the phonemes together to read the word. (ie. d-o-g  becomes dog)

Each week we will be sending a ‘learn at home’ sheet, which recaps the phonics learning from the week. Please look at this with your child and complete the activities.

Help at Home: Be Sound Detectives – Find objects around your house or outside that have an initial sound that we have learnt: s   a   t   p   i   n   m   d

School Library

Over the last couple of weeks we have introduced the children to the school library. They have impressed us with how well they followed the school rule ‘We are respectful.’ They were quiet in the space and they were very careful with the books. This week, your child chose the book they wanted to bring home to share with you. Please remember that this is a book to foster a love of reading. It is a book for you to share at home and not for your child to read aloud to you.

eBooks

Next week, you will be issued your first eBook to share with your child. The first book will be a wordless book. As with the library books, these books can foster a love of reading, even without words. Discussing story events, characters and settings all help your child to understand comprehension in reading.

Please read with your child each week. As teachers, we have access to reading reports. We will be giving out certificates in class to celebrate your child’s reading at home.

Your login details and reading record will be sent home soon. Please let us know if you do not have access to a device to read at home, as we have iPads for loan at the school office.

Poetry Picnic

Each week, we will learn a new poem and will recite this poem every day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is called Chop Chop.

Chop Chop
Chop, Chop, Choppity Chop.
Cut off the bottom and cut off the top.
What there is left, we put in the pot.
Chop, Chop, Choppity Chop

Here’s a video of Rainbow Class performing the poem. Look out for  a video of Sunshine Class next week.

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Frida Khalo Gallery

Each half term, we will introduce the children to a new artist. This week we introduced Frida Khalo. We watched a short informative video to find out about her. After that, we set off to visit a ‘gallery’ that we had set up for the children. At the ‘gallery’ we viewed photos of some of Frida Kahlo’s work. We noticed how many of her paintings had bright colours in them and that animals featured in many of them too. Frida’s self portraits will inspire us to paint our own self-portraits over the next couple of weeks.

Let’s get busy.

This week, many children continued with their transition sessions and have stayed for a full day at Nursery.  We’ve had lots of happy faces as children waved good-bye to parents and carers each morning.

Here are a few photos of our play and learning this week – you can see that children are very busy and happily, engaged in play. This is just what we like to see once children have settled into their new environment! We strive to make Nursery a happy and healthy place to learn.

We were really excited to pull up the carrots from our garden this week. Look how big they are. We washed them, cut them and enjoyed them at snack time. Yum, yum.

Now that children are familiar with our Nursery classrooms, over the next few weeks, you’ll start to see some changes in our areas of provision as we introduce new small world areas and themes for our learning.

Help at home – Can you sing the ” Wheels on the bus” nursery rhyme? Can you remember all of the actions?   The Wheels on the Bus

Next week we will be reading our first focus story ” The Three Little Pigs”. We will  be using story props to retell the story. The Three Little Pigs

Reminders

• Don’t forget to let us know your child’s current interests for our “What makes me tick” board.
• We need your child’s All about me sheet brining back to nursery, it’s not too late.

Science-The Human Body

We have begun our biology topic: The Human Body. We have been able to name many parts of our body and learn some new ones. This week we were working scientifically by investigating the question: ‘Do the oldest children have the longest feet?‘ After comparing our feet, we drew around them and put them in order of birthday month. Here are some of our findings:

No because some of the youngest children have big feet.

Some older children have big feet and some have small.

We all grow at different times and will be different sizes.

Help at home by naming and talking about different body parts, bones and their function.

Welcome to 1A!

What a fantastic week we’ve had in 1A! The children have settled very well into their new classroom and we are all getting to know each other. I am very impressed at how quickly the children have adapted  to their new environment and routines.

We have practised some of our sounds in phonics and practised our handwriting. We’ve written our full names every day this week using a whiteboard pen! We are going to do this every morning when we come into school.

It is also important that we strengthen our fingers, so we’ve done some ‘dough disco’ to practise our fine motor skills.

In Maths, we’ve been counting all the way to 10 (forwards and backwards). We’ve also been practising writing our numbers the right way around in books. Today, we worked together to identify and order numicon from 1-10.

All of the children have been super brave and resilient this week. We’ve talked about our emotions, what makes us happy and how we can recognise emotions in others.

In PE we played a co-ordination game called ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and cone’. We even had fun balancing the cone on our head and walking from one end of the playground to the other without dropping it!

Well done 1A for a brilliant start to the year. I can’t wait to see what the year brings.

Topic – Exploring Our Green and Pleasant Land

This half term, Year 5/6 have begun an exciting new Geography topic. We’ve been diving into the natural beauty that surrounds us – both near and far – and learning how these precious places are protected and why they matter.

To kick things off, the children explored the many benefits of National Parks across the UK, from protecting wildlife and habitats to encouraging outdoor adventures and boosting our wellbeing. We’ve been amazed by the variety of landscapes and the work being done to preserve them.

Bringing the learning closer to home, the class have also been identifying green spaces within Leeds and our local area, thinking about how these spots provide a place to relax, play, and connect with nature – even in a busy city.

It’s been a brilliant start to the topic, and the children have shown real curiosity and enthusiasm. We can’t wait to continue our journey, learning more about how we can protect and appreciate the green spaces around us!

Help at Home: Ask your child about their new topic vocabulary.