Reception Class News

Reception won the Cool Class Cup!

We are very proud to have won the cup this week.

All the staff in school give Cool Class Tokens to children for such things as manners, behaviour and effort. These tokens are collected and counted at the end of  each week. The class with the most tokens wins the cup which is awarded in our Good Work Assembly on Friday.

Learning to write

In Reception we are continuing to learn letters and sounds. As they learn each letter, the children will be shown how to write the ‘grapheme’ (a way of writing down a sound or phoneme; graphemes can be made up of one letter like ‘p’ and ‘s’, two letters like ‘sh’ and ‘th’, three letters like ‘tch’ in a word like ‘catch’ or four letters like ‘ough’ in ‘dough’ or ‘cough’, where the same grapheme is used to represent two different sounds). You can download a guide to how we form our letters in the Help Your Child section on this website.

Remember that children need lots of practice with different activities to develop the muscles necessary for writing. When the muscles of the hand are weak, or when the fingers have not learnt to work together well, the child often compensates by using a poor or faulty pencil grip.

Here are some fun things to try at home to help your child develop these essential muscles:

Using an egg box, have your child hold 6-10 beans in their hand, and place them into the container one by one.  Write a number inside each hole and ask your child to add the correct number of beans.  This is also a great way to reinforce the concept of number. You could also have a race to see who can put five beans into each hole in the fastest time! The important thing is to do it one bean at a time.

Give your child a few coins to hold and ask them to push them one at a time through the slot in a money box. Make sure the coins are placed with the tips of the fingers, not the sides of the fingers.

Using  Play Dough is great exercise for the fingers – try squashing, rolling, pounding and moulding with the hands, without using any cutters or other traditional Play Dough toys.

Other activities may include cutting with scissors, doing up buttons, tearing paper and picking up the pieces. Let your child help with the washing up and wring out the dishcloth!

New SEAL theme – Getting on

The SEAL theme Getting On covers four main aspects:

• developing the social skills of friendship
• working well together in a group
• managing anger
• resolving conflict

Group work takes place across all lessons and even at lunchtime and playtimes.  Some questions for children to consider are:

• Did everyone take turns?
• Did everyone listen to what other people thought?
• Did each person have chance to tell the group what they thought?
• If people had different ideas could the group reach a compromise?

The key areas of learning throughout this theme are empathy, managing feelings and social skills.

Within this theme is Antibullying Week, 19 November – 23 November.

Outdoor maths

The children are learning to recognise and write numerals whilst playing skittles.

Phase 2 Phonics

This week, we’ll begin Phase 2 of Letters and Sounds. In this phase, children will continue practising what they have learned from phase 1, including ‘sound-talk’. They will also be taught:

• the phonemes (sounds) for a number of letters (graphemes),
• which phoneme is represented by which grapheme, and
• that a single phoneme can be represented by more than one letter, for example, /ll/ as in b-e-ll.

They will be using pictures and hand movements to help them remember these.

VC and CVC words

C and V are abbreviations for ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’. VC words are words consisting of a vowel then a consonant (e.g. am, at, it) and CVC words are words consisting of a consonant then a vowel then a consonant (e.g. cat, rug, sun). Words such as tick and bell also count as CVC words – although they have four letters, they have only three sounds. For example, in the word bell, b = consonant, e = vowel, ll = consonant.

Now the children will be seeing letters and words, as well as hearing them. They will be shown how to make words using magnetic letters, how to read (blend) little words and how to segment words into individual sounds.

These will be simple words made up of two phonemes, for example, am, at, it, or three phonemes, for example, cat, run.

Tricky words

They will also learn several tricky words: the, to, I, go, no.  Children will still be practising oral blending and segmenting skills daily. They need plenty of practice at doing this.

Saying the sounds

Your child will be taught how to pronounce the sounds (phonemes) correctly to make blending easier.  Sounds should be sustained where possible (e.g. sss, fff, mmm) and, where this is not possible, ‘uh’ sounds after consonants should be reduced as far as possible. Try to avoid saying ‘buh’, ‘cuh’ etc.

Ways you can support your children at home

• Magnetic letters  Buy magnetic letters for your fridge. Find out which letters have been taught – have fun finding these with your child and place them on the magnetic surface.
• Making little words together  Make little words together, for example, it, up, am, and, top, dig, run, met, pick. As you select the letters, say them aloud: ‘a-m – am’, ‘m-e-t – met’.
• Make or buy an alphabet poster
• Buy whiteboards and pen  These are a good way for children to try out spellings and practise their handwriting.
• Remember to have fun!

iPad maths

Learning addition with iPads.

Maths in Reception

The children have been making number games.

We’re having a party!

Learning in Reception

There are seven areas of learning in the Foundation Stage. One of these is ‘Expressive arts and design’. Have a look at all the learning and development that took place in this area last week.

Phonics

This week we are blending and segmenting orally. We do this by ‘sound talking’.

The separate sounds (phonemes) are spoken aloud, in order, all through the word, and are then merged together into the whole word. This merging together is called blending and is a vital skill for reading.

Children will also learn to do this the other way around – cat = c-a-t. The whole word is spoken aloud and then broken up into its sounds (phonemes) in order, all through the word. This is called segmenting and is a vital skill for spelling.

This is all oral (spoken). Your child will not be expected to match the letter to the sound at this stage. The emphasis is on helping children to hear the separate sounds in words and to create spoken sounds.

How you can help at home