Reception Spring Term Newsletter

Tuesday 12th January 2016

Dear Parents

Reception Spring Term Newsletter

Welcome back to our spring term. We hope you had a lovely winter break. It has been wonderful to see how happy and excited the children have been about coming back to school and how quickly they have settled back in to school.

Our topic this half term is ‘Explorers and Adventurers’ and it has already captured the children’s imaginations. Our role-play areas have been transformed into a boat and an explorers’ camp and the children have been sharing stories of their own personal adventures and explorations with us (some more believable than others). We have been delighted at how interested the children are in the globe and the world map and how well they have been able to tell, and show us, where they have travelled to and where their families are from.

Timetable

Our timetable for the spring term is as it was last term, but with the new additions of Forest School, PE and music. The standard timetable is attached, but please note that there may be minor changes from week to week. The children are now very familiar and comfortable with the routine of short whole-class teaching sessions on the carpet, followed by teacher-led group activities with plenty of time for playing freely inside and out. We have been busy planning lots of exciting activities for the next few weeks, based on the theme of explorers and adventures, all designed to capture the children’s imaginations, stimulate their curiosity and language and help to deepen their understanding of the world.

We also have a wide variety of activities set up inside and outside each day, for the children to play with, experience and learn from independently. We follow the children’s interests as much as possible and adapt and refine these activities to reflect how the children have interacted with them. Please do let us know if your child is particularly inspired by, or interested in a particular subject. We love working with you to ensure that we create experiences at school that your children will enjoy and remember.

English

Beautiful, inspiring books are at the heart of our curriculum and provide the focus for our role-play, speaking and listening and writing activities. We began the term reading The Great Explorer by Chris Judge. It is a wonderful story of a boy called Tom who decides to rescue his dad, a famous explorer, lost in the North Pole. Tom looks at the atlas, buys some maps, packs his rucksack with lots of very useful items and sets off on his adventure. The children have written excellent lists of what they would pack for an adventure and have started thinking about where in the world they would like to explore.

For the next couple of weeks we are focusing on The Snail and the Whale. We will be working in groups with props and puppets to re-tell the story, explore the rhyming patterns in the text and play games matching pairs of rhyming words; real and nonsense. Writing activities will include snail-trail writing, sending postcards from different parts of the world and writing a thank you letter from the snail to the whale. It is very exciting to see the children using their phonic knowledge in their writing and to experience their pride - and often amazement – at what they are able to achieve. Please do feel free to ask for an informal chat at the end of the school day and an opportunity to see what your child has been producing in class.

Other books this term will include Miranda the Explorer by James Mayhew and Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. We will also read stories about pirates and space exploration. We are planning on ending the half term looking at people whose job is to be a rescuer.

Phonics

In phonics we have been revising the letter names and sounds that we learned last term and will now move on to learning the next set of sounds; j, v, w, x and y as well as ‘ch’ and ‘sh’. Learning a new letter includes listening carefully to its sound, identifying that sound within words, learning to recognise the letter and forming it correctly. We are also beginning to learn how to read and write ‘high frequency words’ such as no, go, the, he and has. These are also known as ‘common exception words’ because at this stage of their phonics learning, these words are not always easy for the children to read or write. We will be practising blending the letter sounds we have learnt to read words, as well as segmenting words into their separate sounds to help us with our writing.

Maths

This half term we will continue to practise our counting; forwards and backwards and starting from different numbers, not just 0 or 1. As well as lots of counting, we are learning the names of different shapes, both 2D and 3D, and will be developing our mathematical language to help us describe the properties of shapes.

We will also be busy exploring capacity and weight through lots of practical activities, both inside and outside, using the water trays and sand pit to enhance our learning. We will look carefully at patterns and will create our own through various art and craft activities.

We will begin to find totals of groups of objects and will start to use the language of addition and subtraction. We will also practise using the language of comparison and will be finding one more and one less than different numbers.

Guided Reading

The children are showing great enthusiasm for their guided reading sessions. We are already noticing super progress in both their knowledge of different letter sounds and their growing confidence in blending those letter sounds together to read whole words. They are now in the routine of discussing books in small groups, confidently sharing their ideas and making predictions about what might happen next, or discussing the characters and settings.

BSL & Mandarin

We are continuing this term with twice-weekly Mandarin lessons and weekly British Sign Language sessions. As you will have noticed from their fantastic signing in the Harvest Assembly and the Nativity, the children learn new languages incredibly quickly. Many of you have also reported how your children have been singing and counting in Mandarin over the Christmas Holidays. We are one of only three primary ‘Confucius Classrooms’ in the country and feel very lucky to have two Mandarin teachers at Highgate Primary. As well as teaching the children songs and simple phrases in Mandarin, Rui will also carry on with her Chinese art and craft activities in the shared art area on Monday and Tuesday mornings. So far this term the children have enjoyed different calligraphy and paper cutting activities, such as painting Mandarin characters and cutting out heart paper chains.

Now that the children are confident, happy and settled at school, we are adding a few new subjects into the Reception curriculum: Music, PE and Forest Schools.

Music

Hilla Moshenson, our music and performing arts teacher, will be teaching music to the children in the music room on alternate Tuesdays. Our first lesson was very successful and included an opportunity to find out all about different instruments and the sounds they make and join in with singing and repeating rhythms on the claves. The children showed how well they are able to listen and identify differences in volume, pitch and tone.

PE

Last week the children were extremely excited about their first PE lesson in the gym with John, our specialist PE coach. Lessons will take place every Thursday morning. The children won’t need to bring a change of clothes, but will need to take off their socks and shoes. Please ensure that your child is wearing clothes that they can move around in easily on Thursdays.

Forest Schools

Our Explorers and Adventurers topic makes this half term the perfect time to begin Forest School. From next week, we will begin taking children to the woods. RKI will go on Monday afternoons and REH on Wednesday afternoons. We will take 15 children (half of the class) each time. Therefore, each child will go to Forest School every other week. We usually run two sessions for each group, each half term.

More information with dates and groups will follow in a separate letter, but we do rely on parent volunteers for Forest Schools to be able to happen. We would ideally have three or four parents or grandparents who would volunteer regularly for each session that their child or grandchild attends. Please let us know as soon as possible if you are able to help.

Reminders:

Home reading records

We will continue to update you weekly, in their home reading record, on your child’s progress and we will also send home a book for you to read with your child. In return we ask that you read to your child daily and listen to them read to you or discuss a book with you each day. We would really appreciate a short comment from you in the reading record every week, as it is invaluable in helping us choose the best books for your children to bring home.

Book bags

Please continue to bring your child’s book bag, reading book and reading record into school each day. This will allow us to be flexible about when we read with your child’s group. It also means that newsletters, notes home, drawings, invitations and homework books are less likely to go astray.

Homework

We will continue to send an activity home with the children each Friday in their homework books. It will reflect what we have been doing that week in school. Please support your child with the activity and bring the homework books back on a Wednesday so we have time to look at them and comment on them before Friday. We love looking at the children’s homework each week - thank you for all your help and creativity!

School lunches

It is great to see how many children are taking advantage of the free lunches for Reception children. The new menu, which can be found on the school website, is proving very popular amongst children and staff. All the adults sit and eat with the children and encourage them to try the food, which is all cooked at school from fresh ingredients. The children are becoming more adventurous all the time at trying new things and discovering how much they like them. Raw pepper slices have been a recent hit.

Nature kitchen

Thank you very much for the contributions you have made to our nature kitchen. We really appreciate the donations of herbs, pinecones, leaves and shells. If you are also able to volunteer to occasionally clean and tidy the kitchen for 10 minutes at the end of the day, we would be very grateful. If you can help, please talk to Janine, Jenny or Olwen the Reception class reps.

Donations

As well as ingredients for the nature kitchen, we always appreciate donations of junk modelling materials from your recycling boxes as well as flour, oil, salt, food colouring and cream of tartar for making play-dough. We will put a new list up on the classroom doors letting you know what you could donate if you would like to.

Spare clothes

Please make sure your child has a bag of spare clothes on their peg. If your child does come home in spare school clothes, please do wash and return them. Our collection of spare clothes is much smaller than it was and we are very low on leggings, tracksuit bottoms and socks.

Spring Term Important Dates

Thank you for all your support.

With very best wishes

The Reception Team

Kate, Emma, Rosie, Tom, Danielle, Gerry, Fran and Lisa

Enc. Reception Spring Term Timetable

Headteacher: William Dean Highgate Primary School, Storey Road, London N6 4ED

tel: 020 8340 7023 | fax: 020 8341 6266 | |