Week commencing 15th April - Week 2

Dear parents and carers,

Apologies for the delay - it's been a super busy week for staff before and after school!

This week, we learnt all about the Gingerbread Man, learning the story using a story map and adding actions following Pie Corbett's 'Talk4Writing' approach. We explored lots of different versions of the story and started to develop our understanding of fairytales coming from oral tradition, resulting in many different takes on the tales with some subtle differences as well as some major changes to the endings!

We also carried out and wrote up our findings from a science experiment: 'Which liquid puddle would the Gingerbread Man survive in?' 

We made lots of observations and drew out some brilliant vocabulary to describe what we noticed.

In maths, we continued work on counting up to 20 and beyond, as well as understanding composition of larger numbers by subitising smaller numbers within them. We had to 'take a picture' in our minds to help visualise a dot pattern we'd seen, then recreate it using concrete manipulatives, from memory! 

We also learnt about how Sikhs all around the world have been celebrating Vaisakhi. We hope that all our families who observe the festival have had a wonderful time and enjoy any processions and events they might attend this weekend.

Next week we'll be focusing on another favourite traditional tale: Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Summer Term Week 1

Dear parents and carers,

We hope you all had a lovely Easter break - although it feels like a long time ago now!

We also hope that the families celebrating Eid this week had a wonderful time. The children have been learning about the Muslim tradition of Ramadan and how Eid al-Fitr is a celebration to break the fast.

This week we've begun our new topic for this half term: 'What stories could our magic carpet take us to?'

We have focused on learning and reciting all the various nursery rhymes we know and managed to produce quite extensive lists in both classes!

In phonics, we've been revising Levels 1+ and 2, assessing to identify where any knowledge gaps are so we can keep revisiting alongside our progression onto Level 3 next week!

In maths, we've been reminding ourselves of the important rules we need to follow for accurate counting, as we move to counting larger quantities, beyond 20! See if your child can tell you what good counting involves.

We've also started following our new handwriting programme 'Letter-join'. You'll find a sheet in your child's phonics folder this week, where the front side has been completed and there's another copy on the back for you to help your child practise at home if you get a chance. We'll try to send a sheet or two home most weeks, to help you support your child to develop clear and neat letter formation.

Next week we will be  starting work on our first fairytale ... The Gingerbread Man!

Week 4 - Week commencing 8th April 

Good afternoon,

We've had a super busy week with visits from a nurse, firefighters with their fire engine and paramedics with their ambulance! The children really enjoyed these fantastic hands-on experiences and had the chance to explore different equipment, learn new vocabulary and ask lots of questions. Thank you so much to all our visitors so far for giving up their time and providing such fabulous sessions for the children to enjoy. We're very lucky to have so many parents and carers who are real-life superheroes!

Thank you to everyone who could make it to the interactive parents' phonics session on Monday. It was great for you to see how we teach reading and writing in school as well as having positive learning interactions with your children in the school setting. We sent home the packs with phonics and 'Helpful/Tricky Word' games and suggestions for activities. We hope they're useful to you.

It was also lovely to meet with so many of you at parents' evening yesterday evening. Thank you for your support and working with us to maximise your children's learning. We're looking forward to the remaining meetings taking place next Wednesday (20^th March).

Don't forget, it's the FoB EYFS disco next Monday 18^th March, 3:15pm-4:30pm.

In case you haven't yet booked and would like to, please see the attached letter with all relevant information.

Vegetable plea

Next week we'll be focusing on the story of 'Supertato'. Could all children please bring in one vegetable of their choice for Monday 18th? We will be fashioning our own superhero veggies to inspire roleplay and writing. We'll provide all the other parts in school, we just need the veg please! 

See below for the type of thing we're aiming for:

Week commencing 19th Feb - Spring 2 Week 1 - What makes a superhero?

We hope you all had a great half term break. The children have loved getting stuck into our new topic 'Do we know any superheroes?'.This week, we've been dressing up as our favourite comic book characters, making cuffs and lollipop stick heroes, writing invisible Batman messages, drawing webs for Spiderman and much more!

We've returned to reading fiction in our Book Talk sessions and learned two more sounds in phonics. Now that we're familiar with the routine, we complete our phonics sheets more independently as morning jobs twice a week. This frees up more learning time to develop and practise our writing skills!

We have also been continuing to consolidate our subitising skills and understanding of the composition of the numbers 6, 7 and 8, seeing them as 'five and a bit'. 

We also managed to cram in different activities for 'Active Day' today! Please ask your child what they got up to as it quite different from our usual Friday routine.

Here are the links we've used to aid our learning this week. We're now taking requests from the children for dough disco songs instead of choosing our own.

Because we carried out lots of our planned activities for Children's Mental Health Week this week, we've included a few of the breathing and mindfulness exercises the children took part in. They've been a big hit with the children so we will be using them regularly in reception.

Week commencing 5th Feb Week 5 - How do children and their families celebrate Chinese New Year?

The children have enjoyed a wide range of activities inspired by the Lunar New Year this week.They are making fantastic progress in their learning, across all the seven areas of learning.

There have been a few occasions over the past couple of weeks where children have helped themselves to our playground equipment after the school day has ended. We must insist that this does not happen and that any stray equipment found is returned to the trolley as school property is being lost and damaged.

An important part of our ethos and what we teach children about school life is showing respect to and taking care of others around us as well as our environment. This includes looking after resources and equipment. We appreciate your support with this as parents and carers, ensuring the children understand that the things we have in school are not easily replaceable.

Week commencing 29th Jan Week 4 - Is it always sunny in Australia?
 

This week we've learned all about the land down under and enjoyed getting creative through designing boomerangs, making didgeridoos and creating dot art lizards. We even enjoyed a visit from some very special guests this afternoon - See if you can spot them in our floor book photos.

We've been practising writing more CVC words, working on spelling, letter formation and finger spaces when recording a dictated sentence about Uluru, as well as composing our own sentences about an Australian animal.

We have also been exploring the composition of numbers bigger than five, finding the '5 within'.

We now have just one more week left before half term - it's flown by! Next week we'll be learning about China and the Lunar New Year.

Children's Mental Health Week falls across next week too, but we'll be focussing on the activities we have planned for it in the week after half term (beginning 19^th February). The theme this year is: 'My Voice Matters'. Watch this video to hear more about the theme, directly from children and young people.

It's also Safer Internet Day on Tuesday 6^th February and Mrs Colston will be leading some activities to raise the children's awareness of how to stay safe online when she teaches them on Thursday afternoon. The learning will be based around the theme ‘Inspiring change? Making a difference, managing influence and navigating change online’.