Friday 24th January

Requests and reminders:

• You are invited to Reception class assembly on Friday 31st January at 9.15 am. Please come and watch and then come back to the classroom to share your child's work with them.
• If you have any children's magazines your child has finished with, we would be grateful if you could donate them for our guided reading carousel.
• Fair trade cafe- you are invited to come to our Reception Fair trade cafe on Monday 2nd March at 9.15 am-10am. The children will be able to sit with you and have a snack and drink at the cafe and will then sing a song before you head home. If you are unable to attend your child may bring in some money to buy something from the cafe. If you can arrange for another parent to sit with them that would be super.
• See below for important information about handwriting .

Things to do...
• This week the children have been taught the phoneme 'ss', 'll' and 'ff'
• Please remember to help your child learn their key words. It helps to stick them on post-its around the house to be read each time they walk past. You could also focus on a few and play snap or pairs with them. The children's reading improves very quickly once they are able to recognise these words. In order for children to read Yellow books they need to be reading read with fluency which means recognising the key words.
• Talk about Winter as you go for a walk.

The children have really enjoyed learning about Chinese New Year.  This year is the Year of the Rat. The children listened to the story of how the year gets its name. In Adult Directed activities, the children have worked in groups making Chinese Dragons. They have also listened to Chinese music and made up Dragon dances. In Music Assembly this week, half the class played Chinese music while the other half danced and then they swapped. The children coloured Chinese fans and wrote about the animals from the Chinese story in Guided writing.

On Friday afternoon we had a visitor who came and talked to us about Chinese New Year and how they celebrate. We learnt that today is Chinese New Year and first the house has to be cleaned in preparation and then decorations are put up. Then they have a special meal and the children aren't forced to eat their vegetables but can eat lots of delicious food.  They can have fireworks over the next 14 days until the next lunar moon. On this date they have a lantern celebration. They can eat yummy food during this entire 2 week period. There are Chinese dragon and tiger dances which wish businesses a happy new year. Tonight the children wish their parents good luck and Happy New Year and they may receive some money in a red envelope from their parents and friends and family.

In Woodland Learning the children have been learning about Winter. They went for a Winter walk and  talked about the changes that have happened and then used the ipads to take a picture of a winter tree. They then chose their best picture and drew a detailed winter tree in pencil.

In ChIL the children have continued to extend their learning about Chinese New Year. Some children chose to do more writing about it. Some wrote and decorated Chinese pictures. The children loved our Chinese role play restaurant/cafe. They enjoyed dressing up and playing with the musical instruments. Some of the children love playing with the Mobilo. We asked them to plan their design before making their model. They worked very hard. The children enjoyed playing with the ice on Monday. On Wednesday afternoon the children had friendship time and played board games together learning to take turns.

In maths this week the children have been learning all about subtraction and the associated language: taking away, minus,  how many left. They learnt to recognise that when we subtract the answer will always be smaller than the number we started with. In one activity the children used the buses and little people to practise their subtraction. They also used the sponge tens frames with counters and the multi link to practise taking away. We challenged some of the children to solve maths problems. For example, 8 children ran in a race, 3 children fell over, how many children got to the finish line? I have 8 smarties and eat 4 of them how many do I have left?

Handwriting

As you are aware the children have been learning  to write in a cursive style since the beginning of Reception. Some children have found this extremely difficult as their fine motor control is just not ready yet. While a few children are able to take this on board (some of the children’s names are looking good), we have found that many children are finding it difficult to link the phonemes  to what they look like in the written form.  This appears to be slowing down their progress in writing as they are forgetting what phoneme comes next as they struggle to find the correct letter and write it. While they  may be unable to identify a ‘b’ in the cursive form we have found that they usually know what it looks like in print (they are use to seeing the letters in print in books).

For this reason we have decided from now on to teach ALL children their letters in print form.  This is what we will model in lessons, use in phonics and focus on in handwriting sessions.   At home it would be good to practise with the print style. When writing in school, there will be alphabet cards with formation of the letters in print and cursive out on the tables.

Once they reach Year 1 they will learn the cursive style. The current year 1’s  are progressing well with their cursive form and we feel it is because they already new the basic formation and can already recognise all their sounds. 

So here are the letter families. We will be teaching the letters in these families during handwriting practise and will be demonstrating print in phonics lessons. All of the practise of letters we have completed so far will not be wasted as it will feed into what we are doing now.  Like anything in schools, we try something new.  Sometimes it works and other times we feel there is a better way.  We hope you understand.




We have sent the handwriting formation sheet home in your child's book bag. It shows formation for left handed children on one side and right handed on the other. Please ensure you use the correct side of the sheet!!
Have a wonderful weekend.
The Year R Team