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Reception - St Mary

Welcome to Reception!

Class teacher - Miss Lane

Spring 1 Topic: Our World and Everything in it.

This term we shall guide and progress the children primarily in the 3 prime areas of the all 7 inter-connected areas of learning and development within the EYFS Framework.

These 7 areas are:

Prime Areas:

Communication and Language (Listening, Attention and Understanding, Speaking)

Personal, Social and Emotional Development (Self-Regulation, Managing Self and Building Relationships)

Physical Development (Gross Motor Skills and Fine Motor Skills)

Literacy (Comprehension, Word Reading and Writing)

Maths (Number and Numerical Pattern)

Understanding the World (Past and Present, People, Culture and Communities and The Natural World)

Expressive Arts and Design (Creating with Materials and Being Imaginative and Expressive)

We monitor the children's progression through adult and child daily interactions, observations during whole class, group, individual teaching and play during continuous provision.

Maths

In Maths we will be focusing on counting objects, actions and sounds, ordering and recognising numerals to 10, exploring 1 less and 1 more, subitising (instantly recognise small quantities to 5), singing counting songs, comparing and ordering, one to one correspondence, and recalling number bonds to 5.

Literacy

Spring 1 Key Texts: Somebody Swallowed Stanley, Stanley's stick, I love Chinese New Year.

In literacy, we will continue teaching the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Phonics scheme, specifically; segmenting and blending the sounds in words, reading words, captions and sentences and spelling tricky words as well as attempting to write our own phonetically plausible sentences. We move through the programme by daily phonics sessions where children have the chance to read and write the sounds.

For more detailed information on the phonics phases please see the Little Wandle website: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/ and click on the parents tab. We will be doing lots of mark making in a variety of contexts and for varied purposes, encouraging the use of the letter formation as we learn them. We will be working hard on our speaking and listening skills, having paired discussions with our 'talk partners', telling our news and sharing lots of stories and rhymes. We will be using the Tales Toolkit approach ( https://talestoolkit.com/) to support shared narratives and independent story telling.

Religious Education

We use the schemes, Come and See and Caritas in our RE lessons. Below is an overview of what your child will cover over in the Spring term.

The themes and topics will be:

Local church - community: celebrating

Eucharist-relating: gathering

Lent/Easter-giving: growing

Rights and responsibilities: God wants everyone to be happy. God give us all we need to be happy. Making the right choices. We all share God's gifts.

As part of our Catholic ethos. we love to involve family life within our school life and may ask you for photos of special events or people, such as baptism, Christmas and other important celebrations to reflect upon in our weekly Collective Worship sessions.

RSE

This term we will teach RSE, using the scheme Ten Ten - Life to the Full. Below is an overview of the lesson objectives your child will cover over this term.

PE (Physical Education) in Reception will continue to take place each Monday. Your child should continue to arrive to school in their PE kits each Monday. They will not need their standard school uniform on this day as they will stay in their PE kits all day.

As in line with our school uniform policy, your child’s PE kit should be as follows:

Plain navy joggers (no brands or logos).
A pair of trainers (velcro trainers if they cannot tie their laces independently).

Home Learning

Book bags and reading books will be issued on a Friday at the end of the day. These need to be returned each Friday morning.

Daily activities to complete with your child-

Regular name writing practice - please encourage your child to practice writing their first name, encouraging them to use an upper-case letter for their initial and lower-case letters for the other letters.

Daily reading practice - please continue to engage with daily reading with your child; this could be through singing rhymes, poems and songs also as well as reading stories. It is really beneficial to read aloud to your child each day. This will prepare them to succeed as a reader. Bedtime stories are so valuable to encourage good future reading habits with your child.

Daily number/counting practice - Counting up to 5, 10 and beyond. Sing number songs and rhymes. Using mathematical language such 'more' and 'less'-this could be done when playing or when preparing food together. Go on a number hunt around the home or outdoors-focus on identifying numerals 0-10. Order numerals to 5 and then 10.

Reading eggs – once a week https://readingeggs.co.uk

Reading eggs makes learning to read interesting and engaging for kids, with great online reading games and activities. Children love the games, songs, golden eggs and other rewards which, along with feeling proud of their reading, really motivate children to keep exploring and learning.

My Maths and Mathseeds – once a week https://mathseeds.co.uk/

Mathseeds is an online website that your child can use to develop pupils’ confidence and fluency in Maths and the interactive lessons provide step-by-step examples to break down learning into manageable chunks. The log in for this is the same one you use for reading eggs.

Phonics home learning – once a week

Please continue to practise the phonemes we have learnt using the weekly phonics sheets in your child's phonics book.

You can then practise these sounds further on fastphonics (www.readingeggs.co.uk/fast-phonics-games), which is the same log in as reading eggs.

Learning logs – Autumn 2, Spring 2 and Summer 2

Last year we introduced our project-based home learning to replace the homework board we previously used. Pupil, parent and teacher voice all showed that project based home learning was the preferred style of home learning as it gave children more freedom to learn about real life world events, share personal experiences and it has helped motivate them to engage in home learning as it is child managed. It encourages the children to be more independent, inquisitive and provides more opportunities for outdoor learning together. This can be completed in your learning log or a scrap book of your choice.

Instead of completing these every half term, we have reduced this to three half terms a year to make it more manageable. They will therefore be given out on the first Monday of Autumn 2, Spring 2 and Summer 2. We ask that their project is brought into school on the last week of that half term to share and celebrate with their peers. You will be given a sheet of paper that will be stuck in your child’s learning log that will outline what the project is and ideas of activities you can do.

Please find below lots of useful websites and links to great resources that can be used

to support your child's learning at home!

Government support for home learning for children aged 0-5 years - https://hungrylittleminds.campaign.gov.uk/

Phonics websites

Mr Mc is doing fun and interactive daily phonics lessons for children age 4-5. He focuses on new digraphs and has lots of different ways to revisit already learnt sounds.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTcZnvuTeovlznioLRo0GOA/videos

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk

https://monsterphonics.com/games/

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/phase-3-games.html

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/english-games/5-7-years/letters-and-sounds

https://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/literacy.html

https://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/alphablocks

Phonics apps

Jolly Phonics Lessons

Meet the alphablocks

Read with phonics games