Welcome back to Spring 1

Happy new year to all our families. We hope you have all had a fabulous Christmas and spent lots of lovely family time together.

The children had a fantastic first term in F2, they settled well and built excellent relationships with their peers and adults. They made some great progress with the first steps of reading and writing and became keen mathematicians exploring numbers to 5 in lots of different ways. The children enjoyed meeting the characters from My Happy Mind and exploring how we keep our brain healthy. They particularly enjoyed our characters that arrived with our Literacy texts, making name labels for them, houses for them to live in and learning facts about them.

Challenges became a great part of children accessing our provision as they began to build a rainbow with their lolly sticks - different challenge areas each week ensured the children explored all of the different areas of provision. This will continue this half term as more challenges are introduced each week.

Our texts this half term are ‘The Storm Whale in Winter’ and ‘Chimpanzee’ a non-fiction text. We start Spring 1 with ‘The Storm Whale in Winter’ which gives the children lots of opportunities to continue to become confident writing simple, accurate sentences. Our second text, ‘Chimpanzee’ is a non-fiction text which gives children the first, in depth, insight into a different type of book and layout. In maths, we will begin by continuing to explore 1,2,3,4 and 5 in lots of ways - we will look at counting, subitising, 1 more and 1 less and how we can make numbers in different ways. We will look at measuring and capacity and then move onto to begin exploring 6, 7 and 8. We will continue our daily phonics lessons and the children will continue to develop their confidence segmenting and blending words and learning lots of new digraphs. In Understanding the world and Exploring Arts and Design we will explore the season of Winter, snow and Ice, Animals from cold climates and pictures from the past.

Reading is key to all learning and we would encourage you all to share books daily with your children. Developing a love of reading from an early age is essential for every child. We will be continuing our guided reading sessions four times each week and the children will continue to bring a reading book home each Friday alongside a book for pleasure for you to read together. Please remember to practise the children’s phonemes and tricky words with them as much as possible as this will really help them with their reading.

Each day follows the same routine which the children thrive upon as they know what to expect. Please see below:

8:30-9:00 – Our doors open from 8.30am when the children can self register and access Calm & Connect activities and check in with staff

9:00-9:10 – Register, Prayer and Song

9:10-9.30 – Literacy Carpet Session

9:30-10:20 – Adult led activity Literacy, Indoor and Outdoor Continuous Provision, Snack

10:20-10:40 – Phonics

10:40-11.20 – Indoor and Outdoor Continuous provision, Snack

11:20-11.45 – Maths Carpet Session

11:50-1.00 – Lunchtime

1:00-1:20 – My Happy Mind Monday/RE/PE or Handwriting (each day differs)

1:20-2.50 – Guided Reading, Indoor and outdoor provision, Interventions, Adult led activities through provision

2:50-3:05 – Story/Rhyme time

We will continue to use Class Dojo to communicate with parents - look out for messages posted on here which include key dates, activities to do at home and class updates. Please feel free to send any photos in of what the children have been up to outside of school, we love looking at these photos together in class.

A few quick reminders - We will be starting to access the hall for PE from this half term - PE Day is Wednesday, please ensure your child comes to school wearing their School PE Kit and pumps or trainers, the children will need a jacket or hoodie on top of their t-shirt please. Children also need to bring a coat every day - we do go out come rain or shine.

Children also need a water bottle each day.

Please make sure all uniform is labelled with your child’s name including their coat and water bottle.

We are excited to see the children continue to have fun with their learning and make more progress.

As always our door is always open, please don’t sit at home worrying about anything, get in touch if you have any questions.

Thank you for your continued support!

Mrs Jones, Mrs Lyon & Miss Ballard x