Welcome to Spring 1!
Dear Parents/Carers and Children, Happy New Year! We hope that you all had an enjoyable Christmas holiday. Many thanks for all of the kind words, cards and gifts that you sent in the last week of term. Your kindness and support is very much appreciated!
The last few weeks at school were great fun.We were incredibly proud of Reception for their amazing efforts in their Christmas Nativity. I’m sure you will all agree that the children were fantastic. We also had so much fun at our first stay and play of the year. Thank you so much for joining us, we are looking forward to more stay and play sessions throughout the year. We are so excited for the year ahead and have lots of exciting things planned in school this term.
'Extraordinary Adventures around the world!'
Spring 1 Learning
Communication and Language
This half term we will be continuing to develop our vocabulary, we will be hot seating different characters from stories, asking and answering questions to find out more about each character. We will be remembering key points from stories and retelling using story language.
PSED
This half term we will be learning about how to manage our own feelings as well looking at how to take on challenges. Through this we will be talking about why we have rules and how they are important. We will also be learning about having the confidence to try new activities and how to show perseverance if they get tricky!
Physical Development
We will be continuing to develop our fine motor skills with our daily finger challenges, so we can hold our pencil and form our letters correctly.
In our PE lessons this half term, we will continue our balance bike sessions, still focusing on developing our core strength and stability. We will also begin a dance unit, where we will experiment with different ways of moving and negotiating space.
Literacy
In phonics, we will continue to learn new phonemes, including digraphs and trigraphs, as well as more tricky words. We will apply our growing phonic knowledge to read words and sentences, and continue to use our Phase 2 and 3 phonic knowledge to write labels and captions linked to the stories we are reading in class. The stories we will be reading this half term include 'Jack Frost', 'The Emperor’s Egg', and 'Supertato'.
Understanding the World
We will be talking about seasonal change, as well as investigating the properties of water and ice. We will be learning about famous explorers and their adventures in Antarctica, as well as using google Earth to compare where we live and the polar regions. We will be finding out about Lunar New Year and learning about how people celebrate this festival.
Expressive Arts & Design
We will be designing and building our own igloos. We will also make our own ‘Supertato’ as well as designing traps to capture the 'Evil Pea'. We will be performing our own Lunar New Year dragon dance, exploring ways of moving and using instruments to make sounds.
Cold weather
As we're sure you are aware, the temperatures have definitely dropped recently! Please can you ensure that your child is dressed appropriately for the weather that day. We will be spending periods of time outside whatever the weather . Please ensure that all items are labelled with your child's name. Later this term, Reception will be spending every Monday morning in our outdoor area for the full morning. The outdoor environment is a crucial part of our early years curriculum and supports children’s learning and development. Please ensure children are dressed appropriately, and in colder weather feel free to send extra layers to keep them warm.
Reading: Tricky Words
‘Tricky words’ are words that cannot easily be decoded (‘sounded out’ and read).This is because some of the sounds in the words are spelled in an unusual way. It is important for children to be able to read these words as they are among the most common words in English. The tricky words can be very ‘tricky’ to remember and children need to learn them off by heart. Please could you continue to practice reading the tricky words as much as possible at home. We will be sending a list of these words home in reading diaries. Many thanks for your ongoing support.
We will send home the Spring 1 Grapheme sheet for this half term. Please continue to reinforce new phonemes/graphemes that we have taught at school at home.
Lunar New Year
We are looking forward to learning about and celebrating Lunar New Year this term in Reception. Lunar New Year is 17th February. As this day falls in half term, we will be celebrating it on Friday 13th February. We will be having a fun-filled day of activities to celebrate and are inviting children in Reception to wear non uniform with something red on this day.
Dates for your Diary
- 13th February - Lunar New Year Day in Reception-children to wear something red.
We are usually available before and after school should you need to speak with us. You can catch us on the door most days or you can contact the office to make an appointment if you need to talk to us privately or at length. Thank you for your continued support, we look forward to having a successful half term.
Best Wishes,
Miss Storey, Miss Burns and Miss Elvin
Credits:
Created with images by Hide_Studio - "Beautiful Fireworks on the sky background." • Rawpixel.com - "Woman holding a smiley face icon" • chalongrat - "colorful colored pencil and white paper on wooden background" • deagreez - "Creative collage picture young man funky dancer positive mood ballet scales platform balance geometry figures drawing background" • Ievgenii Meyer - "Christmas living room with Christmas tree and gifts under it" • anatoliy_gleb - "Happy child riding balance bike. Male toddler kid in helmet learning to ride on run bicycle at skate park." • peshkova - "Сoncert stage with spot lights" • Volodymyr - "Gold star trophy isolated on black. 3d illustration 3D render"