Autumn Term
2017
Curriculum Notes
to Parents
Welcome to the first edition of Curriculum Notes to Parents for this New Year at school in 2017/18.
This booklet is given to all our families and it gives details about the areas of work and topics to be covered by all the classes during the Autumn Term. I also try to share other useful and relevant information with you too.
I hope you find this booklet useful in supporting the learning of your child(ren) through a variety of ways, such as getting library books on topics being studied, researching on the internet, using resources from home and most valuably talking to your child(ren) about their learning. Your child(ren) love how interested you are in their school work and it will add to their engagement and motivation.
Each year we have a School Improvement Plan which sets out our key priorities for the year ahead and how we are going to achieve them. These priorities are shared with you in this booklet. I have also included a section that includes Top Tips of things to remember at the beginning of the new term and year, which I thought would be useful.
The very back page has “Dates for your Diary” and I have tried to go long term with this and put in all events that I know until Christmas!!!
Hopefully this means you will not miss any of them but please look carefully at the weekly newsletter for dates and times of other events. Newsletters are sent home every Monday but spares are kept in the reception area of the school and it can also be found on the school website.
I hope you find all the sections useful and they help you support your child(ren) with their learning and also allows you to find out more about our school. Thank you in anticipation of your invaluable support with everything we do.
Sarah Bamber
Oak Class
Our whole school topics this term are ‘What a wonderful world’ and ‘Let’s Celebrate’
Personal, Social and Emotional Children will learn the rules and routines of the classroom so they feel safe and secure in their environment. During ‘Key Worker Time’ they will get to know the other children in the class, looking at how they are the same and different. During ‘getting learning’ time we will support the children so they are able to share, take turns and play with other children in the class. As part of PSHE work we will be using the SCARF resources from the Life Education Bus, focusing on the topics Healthy Lifestyles and Move your body.
Communication, Language and Literacy - This term we will be looking at a range of texts including Room on the Broom, Once There Were Giants, Rosie’s Walk, Funnybones and Noah’s Ark stories. We will work with Year 1 and 2 to plan a wedding based on the story ‘The Scarecrows Wedding’. Children will have a daily 20 minutes phonics session in a small focused group. In this session the children will learn all the letter sounds and begin to blend these together for reading. I will be running a Phonics Workshop on 14th September at 9am to support you with helping your child with phonics and reading. We will be learning that books have titles, authors and illustrators and children will re-enact and retell a range of stories in the correct sequence. Children will learn to recognise and write their own name. We encourage the children to look at print all around them and they will begin to understand that this print has a purpose. The children’s writing skills will develop through various fun activities involving sand, gloop, slime, paint, finger painting, chalk, water and sky writing. We want to encourage your child to develop a love for writing and an eagerness to write for lots of different purposes.
Physical The children will begin to experiment with different ways of moving including like a frog, bunny, crocodile, bear, caterpillar and learn to follow instructions by playing games like ‘Follow my Leader’. They will learn to follow instructions and be able to stop and find a space. They will learn to dress, undress and manage their own personal hygiene (knowing when to wash their hands and how to do this correctly). They will learn to travel around, under, over and through apparatus and begin to discuss why it is important to keep healthy. The children will learn about healthy eating and the importance of a balanced diet. The children will have lots of opportunities to use large equipment, including the bikes, learning how to use these safely. The children will work hard on their fine motor skills with activities involving threading and playdough to strengthen the muscles in their hands. The children will make anticlockwise and vertical movements with a pencil, moving onto forming recognisable letters. When using large equipment for den building, the children will learn how to move equipment safely.
Mathematics The children will learn to recognise and record numbers 0 – 5 moving onto 5 to 9. Through a variety of practical activities they will begin to count up to 10 objects and learn to check their counting. The children will learn to count in different groups of 1s, 5s and 10s. When ready, we will begin to look at which number comes before and after another number to 10. The children will learn to recognise 2D (triangle, circle, square and rectangle) and 3D shapes (cube, cone, cylinder and cuboid). We will play lots of sorting and matching games (sort socks by size or pattern, shoes with or without laces) and talk about patterns on clothes, wallpaper, wrapping paper, toys. We will begin to look at the language of addition and what addition is.
Understanding the World – As Scientists the children will be learning to name and label parts of the body. As Historians, we will be looking at how we have changed since we were a baby and how we are going to change in the future. We will look at our family tree and compare our families. We will also learn about the Hindu festival of Diwali and how this is celebrated. We will have a ‘Colour and Music Day’ on the 19th October. With Year 1 and 2 we will learn about ‘People Who Help Us’ focusing on the different emergency services. They will use ICT to investigate changes to leaves etc. Your child will have daily opportunities to use tape recorders, laptops, computers, photocopiers, keyboards, and cameras as part of their learning.
Expressive Arts and Design -The children will have lots of opportunities to work together to build their own role plays both inside and outside the classroom, through den building, small world play and the mud kitchen. During all lessons we encourage all children to join in and sing familiar songs and take on the role of different characters in stories we have read. When reading the story ‘Room on the Broom’ the children will design, plan, make and evaluate their own broom. The children will learn the skill of colour mixing and shading for our Winter Display.
Please can PE kits be in school every day as we have access to the hall every morning. Children will be read with in school as much as possible so can reading books come to school every day. Your child will read with their Reading Buddy every Friday afternoon which I know they will love!
Thank you Lisa Kelly, Rachel Harding & Claire Bowerman
Beech Class
Literacy
In our work in Literacy this term we will be developing our skills in reading and writing. Throughout the term we will develop our confidence and fluency in reading whilst providing opportunities to talk and show our understanding of what we have read; we will do this by listening to your child read on a one to one basis but also in small guided groups which will support discussion. We will use a range of texts using the children’s interests as a starting point and link them to our whole school topics too, for example during the first half of the Autumn term our topic is ‘What a Wonderful World’ so we will read stories where characters go exploring such as in Jack and the Flumflum Tree by Julia Donaldson. During the second half term our topic is ‘Let’s Celebrate’ so we will use some non-fiction texts to learn about different reasons and ways people celebrate. In our writing we will be doing lots of sentence work focusing on the use of capital letters, full stops and finger spaces and our letter formation too. We will work on thinking about what we want to write and practice saying our sentences before trying to write them. This will help us to write a sentence we can read and help us to think how we can use different grammatical features in our writing, such as using the conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘because’. We will also try to develop our language by adding describing words to our sentences. To support our reading and writing we will work in groups to continue to develop our knowledge of phonics; this will then be supported through continuous provision as well as having guided groups and support throughout the week. On the weekly homework you will be able to see what we will be focusing on in the following week so you can support and prepare your child at home.
Numeracy
In Beech class we will become budding mathematicians in our learning! We will be reading, writing and ordering numbers to 20 and then to 100 or beyond. As well as this, we will be counting in twos, fives and tens and finding one more and one less and ten more and ten less of numbers. We will be learning different strategies to add and subtract and will be learning our doubles and halves of numbers to 20 and beyond and investigating pairs of numbers that make 10, then 20. We will be naming and describing 2D and 3D shapes and using them to make patterns and pictures. We will be sorting and recognising coins and using them in simple shopping activities. We will also be estimating, measuring and comparing weights, heights, lengths, widths and capacities of objects. We will use these skills to help us solve problems where we will have opportunities to apply what we have learnt. Weekly homework is sent out which often shows what we have been doing during the week so you can continue to support your child at home. Homework is also used to let you know what we will be working on in the next week.
Science
Our first topic in the opening half term of the year is ‘What a Wonderful World’. As Scientists we will be learning about our local environment and places we like to visit nearby; we will learn about the changes that occur throughout the year, for example the changes in weather and seasons and how these effect the animals, plants and wildlife that may live there. As well as looking at different habitats we will learn about different animals; texts such as Handa’s Surprise and Brown Bear, Brown Bear will get us thinking about lots of different animals. We will also learn about people too and what living things need to survive, grow and thrive. This will link to a themed week called ‘Who Am I?’
ICT
Computing continues to play an important part in our classroom on a daily basis as we develop how we use a range of different resources available including laptops, ipads, cameras, voice recorders, etc. We will be learning how to log on and off a computer and how to open and close software programs as well as navigate round websites which can be used to help us in our learning; as part of this we will learn the importance of safety on the internet. We will be developing our mouse and keyboard skills and we will use a range of different resources as part of our learning including iPads, laptops, Beebots, cameras and voice recorders.
PE
We will be doing games activities in which we will develop our throwing and catching skills as well as bat and ball skills. We will develop our dance skills by listening to different kinds of music and finding different ways to move to it. PE takes place on Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons. There are also other opportunities for extra sessions and the occasional club which is brought into school so please could you make sure that your child has their PE kit in school at all times. On our allocated PE days please could you make sure that your child does not wear any earrings. Thank you.
PSHE
As part of our PSHE work this year we will be developing skills across areas including resilience, responsibility, being reflective, resourcefulness, reasoning and readiness. During the Autumn term we will focus on resilience and responsibility and link this to our whole school topic of ‘What a Wonderful World’ through learning about rules, rights and responsibilities, caring for the environment and a focus on money too. During this term we will also link our learning to Anti-Bullying Week and Remembrance Day too.
RE
In RE we will explore different religions, including Christianity, where we will have the opportunity to explore different beliefs about God, worship and the world around us; we will do this by asking the question “What do people say about God?” We will read a range of stories and explore artefacts. We will also use RE as a time for reflection; where we can ask questions and develop a sense of wonder about the world using our imagination. We will think about what is important to us, reflect on our own feelings and experiences and develop a sense of belonging. At the end of this term there will be our Infant Nativity too which is a part of our class entitlement.
Creative Curriculum
Our whole school topic for the first half term in Autumn is ‘What a Wonderful World’ so in Beech Class we are going to think about journeys and adventures! We are going to celebrate the places that we like to visit and what it might be like to become an explorer. We visit new places, meet new people and learn new things and this happens daily. We will use this as an inspiration for our learning. We will learn about different places around the UK; its different countries and its capital cities as well as different places that we like to visit. We will learn about how things have changed over time, for example in our local environment, transport, etc. This will also link to a themed week called ‘Who Am I?’ where we will develop skills in history where we will look at changes in the past and present and put events in chronological order. Our creative curriculum allows us to explore the interests of children in Beech class which will help us develop our skills across a number of areas of the curriculum. This will take place during our History, Geography, Art and Design Technology lessons. Keep an eye out for updates on newsletters, in diaries and on tapestry to find out about exciting learning that is taking place in class throughout the Autumn term. During the Autumn term we will also try and on a visit to a place in our local area as part of our entitlement too!
Please could you:
Encourage your child to read for ten minutes each night and write in your child’s diary; they are a great way for us to keep in touch. Also, please could you make sure that reading bags are brought into school everyday; we will change reading books every Monday and Friday. Homework will be sent home on a Friday ready for the Big Write the following week so make sure you support your child in gathering lots of ideas. Maths homework will be sent home too whilst information on the weeks phonics words can also be found in your reading diary.
Thank you in advance- Mr Moulding, Mrs Winter & Mrs Richards
Rowan Class
The whole school topics for this term are “What a Wonderful World” and “Let’s Celebrate…”
English The children will have Big Write homework which will be sent home on Fridays and will then be used to complete an independent piece of writing on Mondays. This gives an opportunity for you to work with your child, talking about what they will be writing about and also gives an excellent opportunity for you to help with researching subjects through library visits or using the internet. Every other week the children will be doing an Independent Write where they will be doing a completely independent piece of writing based on the genre we are doing. Spellings will be sent home weekly and assessed the following week. We will be exploring the different genres of literature such as stories with familiar settings, poetry and non-chronological reports. Children will have opportunities to be story tellers, actors as well as authors. The children will continue to work in their phonics groups daily as well as having Guided Reading sessions and new whole class reading comprehension weekly lessons to help develop your children’s inference and deduction skills. There will also be opportunities for independent reading and developing their comprehension skills. We will be trying to make our ‘writing more exciting’ by using conjunctions to make simple sentences more interesting as well as adding adjectives and adverbs and developing different types of sentences.