Welcome back Reception LM!

Dear parents and families,

I hope you had a fantastic Christmas and a lovely New Year. I greatly enjoyed meeting all of you during our parent’s meetings last term and would like to thank you for coming. One of the main messages I took from speaking to you is how much you do at home to support your children. So to support you in doing this I will be updating the website weekly with information about what your children will be learning in class that week. I will be adding phonics, maths and literacy. I have also included handwriting information (which we will be starting to practise daily in the morning) and some ideas to help develop your child's fine motor skills. If you have any questions please come and ask me in class.

Miss Moffitt

This week:

Phonics – Reading and writing

Phonics is the way we teach reading and writing in schools now. I, and probably most of you, did not learn to read and write using phonics so it can be a confusing system which takes time to understand. Cbeebies have produced a brilliant guide for parents which breaks phonics down into its stages. It has also linked videos to watch with your children to support their current stage in phonics.

You can find the guide here:

www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/article/the-alphablocks-guide-to-phonics

The videos are here:

www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/alphablocks/watch

The group in the library should be watching the red video, the group in the classroom and wet area should be watching the yellow videos. I hope you find this useful.  

Group in the wet area:

This week’s sounds:        ng           ai           ee           igh

Words to practise:    sang  king  ring  wait  pain  rain  feet  keep  week  night  fight  light

Tricky words:     be     was     you

(tricky  words are words the children cannot use phonics to read so need to memorise them)

Once your child has practised reading the words, ask them to give you a sentence with that word in. Then challenge your child to write these words.

Group in the classroom:

This week’s sounds:        sh           ch           th           ng

Some words to practise:   king   ring   bath   path   thin   shed   shell   shop   chin   chop  

Tricky words:     be       was  

(tricky  words are words the children cannot use phonics to read so need to memorise them)

Once your child has practised reading the words, ask them to give you a sentence with that word in. Then challenge your child to write these words.

Group in the library:

This week we will be starting to read and write short words using the following sounds. Encourage your child to sound out short words and blend them back together e.g. s-a-t = sat. Make sure they always blend the sounds back together and say the word.

This week’s sounds:       d     m     g     o 

Some words to practise:    map   dog   dad   sad   got   pot   

Once your child has practised reading the words, ask them to give you a sentence with that word in. Then challenge your child to write these words.

Handwriting

We have finished the Curly C family (called this because they all start with a curly c movement) and will be moving onto the long ladder family of letters this week. Below shows you how each letter is formed. It is important that the children practise forming the letters in this way; start at the dot and follow the arrow, not taking their pen from the paper. If they do not learn to form the letters in this way they may struggle to join up their handwriting in later years.

Fine motor skills

In Reception it is important to develop children’s fine motor skills; skills which are vital for many skills most importantly handwriting. Below are some links to ideas and games to support fine motor skill development. Most activities are very simple and only need household items, there’s no need to buy anything specialist.

www.theimaginationtree.com/2013/09/40-fine-motor-skills-activities-for-kids.html

Playdough is fantastic for developing children’s fine motor skills and they love playing with it. We never buy playdough in school, we make our own using ingredients found in most kitchens. Below is a link to a recipe if you want to make some at home:

www.learning4kids.net/2011/08/08/recipe-for-making-great-play-dough

Some ideas for playing with playdough:

• Hide coins in the playdough for your child to find. They will have to pull the playdough apart. Great for their developing muscles!
• Shaping the playdough into sausages and balls
• Making letters and numbers using the playdough
• Make and decorate playdough cupcakes

Welcome to Reception LM

Welcome to our class page where we will share some of the fantastic work and activities we do in our class.

Below are some photos of our favourite activities we do every week.

Christmas Term

The Reception cohort have been very busy recently preparing for their Christmas Nativity which they presented to an enthusiastic audience. All the teachers and the children's families were very proud of their performance! Watch some our favourite parts from 'Hey Ewe'.

All the Reception staff would like to wish a Happy Christmas to the children and families and we look forward to seeing you in the New Year. We are attaching a parent help sheet for you to help prepare your child for the new topic beginning in January.

Autumn 1

We started Autumn 1 by thinking about ourselves and how we much we have grown up. We made a baby clinic in our role-play area and looked after the babies.

Our favourite topic this half term has been Monsters! We have read lots of scary monster books, made monster masks and finger puppets, talked about our favourite monsters, made terrifying monster-face tortillas and even created our very own class monster, Monster Mike! He's very friendly and doesn't eat Reception children though.

Autumn 2

With the days getting shorter and leaves falling off the trees, we have been thinking about Autumn this half term. We have been on an Autumn walk to Kersal Dale. We looked at the huge trees, the different colours on the leaves and all the different shapes we could see. We even saw a couple of squirrels running through the branches!

We have also had an India day this week to celebrate Diwali. We created Diwa lamps, Rangoli patterns and tasted delicious Indian food. It was a little bit spicy but we enjoyed it!

ICT

This week we have been recording our voices and trying to guess whose voice is who. Can you play our game and guess the voice? It's trickier than you think!