RECEPTION! If you've been there, bought the T-shirt. Please post your single toppest tip please!

[Sycamoretreeisvile]

DD is PFB and will be starting our local state primary in September at the grand old age of 4 and 3 weeks

Please can you be kind enough post your single top tip to help me and DD negotiate this exciting and also vaguely scary time.

Anything from uniform (mind is boggling - how many fleeces, polo shirts, skirts does she need?)to whether or not to bother with school lunches (can I be bothered to make a packed lunch everyday? )

TIA

easy2name shoe labels are BRILLIANT. So are their sticky labels for stuff like water bottles.

Acrylic jumpers are nasty but dry in about five seconds flat, unlike M&S's best cotton efforts ...

Nits are not compulsory. 2.5 weeks of Reception to go and we've not encountered them yet. [hopeful emoticon]

Don't put a 4yo in a tie if you can possibly help it*.

Not all children are exhausted by Christmas. Or Easter. Or the summer. I would have been absolutely kicking myself if I'd cancelled DD's after school activities (which weren't after school when she started them) - she'd have been bored rigid and we'd have driven each other crazy.

• background - didn't put DD in a tie at the beginning of the year, cos I figured at 4.6, feeling nervous, she'd suck it. Last week I picked her up a tie for next year, she's taken a fancy to it, and wore it today. It came home SODDEN. Yuck.

PMSL Lupus, the mind boggles re washing horrors!

And great tip re getting dressed. Have been sorely tempted to try that with getting DD to pre-school but the inevitable weetabix/porridge re-wind, restyle issues just put me off.

The plot thickens - shoe labels you all say? Ok ladies, you speaketh, it shall be done.

Today I have bought:

2 grey skirts
1 grey pinafore
6 yellow polo shirts
Pack of white knee highs
Pack of white ankle socks
4 pair grey tights
50 Taggit wotsits
50 Vinyl Name Tapes coming all the way from US
Pair of M&S velcro fasten plimsols (too late with the doodles advice - next time!)
2 White V-neck sports t shirts
2 Navy Blue cycling short style shorts.
3 Summer dresses (one came free so bought in size up and will put it away for next year)

M&S are having a feckin field day with me

I too felt I was a bit late on the September thread - I posted early then lost all track of it and felt too late to the party to re-ask all the questions again, so thanks to all for indulging me on this thread - it is so helpful to me and all the other newbie school mums.

Make sure she can get dressed and undressed without help (for PE - 2 staff will not be able to help 30 children). Send her in socks on PE days (tights a mare for 4yo).

Make sure she is confident at wiping her bum.

Pack a lunch she can open (eg think carefully about frubes/crisps/juice cartons).

Actually do school dinners (a lot easier).

We have 2-3 skirts (easier than pinafores tho pinafores are sweet on littlies); 5 polos; 2 logo cardies (DD makes one last all week; my boys need a clean one each day ). M&S is good value or TU at Sainsbo's.

Try to be chatty to mums at the gates - you'll be seeing them a lot over the next 7 years!

When you open the book bag and there is a letter in there put the date (costume needed/school trip/welly boot day) on the calendar and in yr diary at once. Also fill in form and find money at once or if you are like me you will forget.

My nightmare scenario (thankfully as yet unrealised) is of walking down the road and seeing all the other children dressed as dinosaurs - DS1: "Oh yes mummy I need a stegosaurus costume didn't I tell you?"

Probably repeating as not read thread all through!

Good tip about keyring onbook bag.

Also yes please label clothes etc. I am always finding abandoned school logo cardies etc with no name, they cost £12 so well worth not losing!

doggiesaywoof we have the skirt issue with DD too. M&S usually do at least one style with adjustable waists. Midn you it does tend to look liek a bustle at the back!

With tights your DD can wear them shorter than you think.

YY to summer dresses in Sept - top tip is to pal up with someone with a yr 1 DD now as they will have some to pass on.

Prepare to chill out over the reading scheme. A DC may know the letter sounds 'c' 'a' and 't' perfectly well but when asked what the word says when you put the letters together may well guess 'gerbil', 'house' or other such nonsense. They are not being alarmingly dense, it's just that their brains aren't wired up to see words that way. Resist the urge to bang your head against the wall in despair. Reading will click eventually, there's no rush and it's far more important to enjoy words in general/being read stories/poems/reading odd words from cereal packets, whatever.

Sycamore, I haven't read everything carefully so someone else may have already said this... I found the taggit name tage useless. They were always falling off, you'd find two or three in the washing machine every time. Plus the DCs were always complaining that the tags themselves dug into their necks.

I found easy2name the best for iron on tags, yet having said that I have only tried a couple of places.

My tips: the iron-on tags come with instructions, but have a practice on an old hanky or something first so that you can get it right. I recently tried these and they were fab once I'd got the hang of them - but the instructions didn't work for me and I needed a much hotter iron than it said, and with these you can't peel it off and start again.

Also - consider your surname. Depending on the size of the school and the unusualness (or lack of) of your surname it can be a good idea to just have your surname printed on the name tags. Then they will do for all your subsequent DCs as well. Even if you are called Smith, if you are in a small school the chance of another child losing an identical piece of kit with the same colour and same style label from the same company is pretty miniscule. The reason I recommend having the same tags for all DCs is that you can never find the right ones in the drawer when you want them.

The other stickers for non-clothes are also very handy - especially when they just MUST take a book or something to school 2 minutes after you should have left, they can be dispatched to put a sticker on it by themselves without all the but-I-can't-find-a-pen-Mummy malarky.

(things I never expected about being a mother #267 - that I would write a lengthy post on mumsnet about bloody nametags)

From preschool age model writing your child's name on pictures they have drawn. Point it out lots, make their name in playdough, magnetic letters on their bedroom door, in sand, etc.

Being able to recognise your name and write your name (in some form, some letters, they may not be formed as adults do, but your child has ownwership of their name), as they arrive at school will help in many areas.

Having said that toileting, dressing, eating independently, talking to adults and children, eating a good filling breakfast before you head off, instilling confidence, sharing, empathy are all such powerful tools for a child entering school for the first time.

I am probably telling granny to suck eggs, as parent reading this are more likely to be proactive parents

Don't necessarily assume your DC will be tired initially (everyone told me this so I made no plans for after school activities only to have him bouncing round the house for the first 2 weeks before the tiredness hit in).

Consider Reception as a settling in and getting used to school phase and anything they learn as a bonus!

LOL Balloon Slayer - I empathise. The taggit things have worked reasonably well for us (main use being in socks, and for the 100s of cuddly toys which take turns in going to school ) I do wish I had gone for just surname though - poor DD has more clothes with DS's name in than she does with her own name in. Not an issue yet, but will be come school - I also find myself cutting the first name off stickers to use for family possessions as naming it as belonging to one DC or the other causes, shall we say, 'friction'.

Beware the class teddy coming home for a visit. This ALWAYS happens on a weekend when you have nothing particularly interesting planned. There is no advance warning. And other parents will have taken digital photos or made beautiful drawings of interesting cultural expeditions, or a weekend hop to Brittany or something.

So make sure you have a digital camera, know how to print out pictures on your own computer, and work out what you can do with the blasted thing at short notice.

Have a snack ready for after school, they get reeeaaaally hungry and cant wait for tea!

SIGG water bottles are the only ones that do not leak in my experience. Tired loads and got totally sick of them leaking in dd's book bag until I heard of these. Now DD is in love with her Hello Kitty sigg bottle.

Tights-- buy an extra few packs now to last the winter, especially if navy uniform. We didn't last year(reception) and found it so hard to get navy tights. A few falls when playing and holes appear in the knees like magic.

Agree with the calendar idea or just something to tell you what happens on Mon, Tues etc etc Also each house at dd's school has show and tell once a month so I note those dates in bold as forgot once at the start of the year and dd was so upset.

Go with school lunches and don't get too hung up on academic side of things - it's much more important that your dd can cope with the practical things before she goes to school ie going to the loo, getting dressed and undressed herself.
Lots of good wishes to your DD. My DS2 will be going in January - can't wait!

I love my children's school, but they are occasionally guilty of assuming you absorb info through osmosis: so one really basic thing is to check where you are meant to drop and pick up because they may not be the same place [bitter experience emoticon]...

Have only just found this thread, and haven't read it all, but reception's not like when we did it - it's all about learning through play, so don't get alarmed if DC tells you repeatedly that all they do is play. It's true, but they are learning too

Oh god yes at the teddy. I always have to subvert the process by writing that we spent the weekend eating Domino's pizza in front of 24 hour monster truck rallies on Men & Motors.

And the Story Sacks will feck you off no end as you will have to spend hours looking for some miniscule knitted acorn and a whole family of knitted squirrels under the sofa because your lovely child got so bored acting out story she/he decided a ritual burial would be more interesting.

Do not think it will be a lovely way to enrich their learning: it won't.

Be VERY, very friendly and nice to the School Administrator. She will be your friend forever and tell you things and help you out. Like most administrators who run it all and really know how things work, you need to NOT be rude to her.

The Class Teddy?! wtf? We have no such beast at our school..

I agree with singersgirl, let them chill. And then give them dinner early, as they usually pek up a bit afer that. Its really hard, as you've missed them all day, and when you pick them up you're all exited to see them and want to play with them and find out all about their day. They, on the the other hand, are exhausted and just want to collapse in front of the telly. Mine were just about ready to talk to me about their day when they were in the bath.

This is so useful, my twin girls start school in September.

One question for those who've done it already - how on earth do you get them up, dressed and out of the door on time 5 mornings a week?

My girls are such dawdlers, we've tried rewards/threats etc to get them out of the door in time for nursery and nothing seems to work that well. Plus we have a baby who will then be 9 months to add into the equation.

They don't really WANT to go to school so there's no big incentive there for getting them out of the door.

There WILL be an alphabet table, guaranteed, and your child will have to bring in an item beginning with the letter of the week every Monday morning. To maintain your Sunday evening sanity,and if you don't already have them, invest in a wide and varied set of plastic animals - it will pretty much see you through from Antelope to Zebra.
And try to fit in, within reason, with any little routines they want to go through to make them feel secure. My DD was in a stand-alone reception unit and I had to wave at every window (about eight) between the door and the car park before she happily turned away and got on with her day. She's 13 now and somehow doesn't seem so interested in Mummy waving to her in public! Strange!

yes to nits

also threadworms

How to get them up and out?

• you must get up in time to be dressed yourself and operating at full power;

- have all clothes, shoes, lunches made the night before and ready (eg underwear out in bedroom, everything else ready on chairs for after breakfast, shoes and bags next to door)

• if necessary, set an alarm clock to ring 10 minutes before you have to leave;
• NO TELEVISION.

(is there a DH or DP with you who could sort out the baby?)

You will need at least 2 pairs of tights for each day as mine goes through tights daily, well she does in winter.

Although I have no idea how she came home wearing 1 sock yesterday

Buy loads of plain white socks then it doesn't matter if they are not a pair orignaly.

Before you start walking home, do check that your child has put their shoes on the correct feet. The number of times when ds was little we got half way home before he said 'my feet hurt' before I realised...

(Class teddy is somethings lots of schools do. Think it amuses the teachers... bet they have at least a wry chuckle imagining the Mrs Precious First Born panicking that she has nothing more entertaining than a trip to Waitrose planned. )

hattyyellow, one thing I did was instil in my DCs a fear of having to "Go In The Late Door."

This is in reality just coming in through reception after the classroom doors have been closed. You have to sign in. But with practice I managed to make it sound like the Gates of Hell itself.

It did all go tits up for me on the day we actually did have to go in the late door. I was boiling with rage at one or both of them for making us so late (one of my DCs would turn Job into John McEnroe).

So, we entered with trepidation the Dreaded Portal. I said to the she dragon receptionist "I'm sorry they're late" < glare at DCs >

"Oh that's ok," she said with a beaming smile, "Go right through."

aaaaaaaarrrrrgh!

Still, up till then it had worked as an encouragement for about 2 years.