Week Ending 06/01/23
Date: 3rd Jan 2023 @ 1:39pm
Happy New Year! Welcome back to the Spring term. We hope you and your loved ones had a wonderful Christmas and we wish you a very prosperous new year.
This week we have been reading Tim Minchin’s book ‘When I Grow Up’ inspired by his musical Matilda. We have been thinking about what it would like to be a grown up and discussed the different things we want to do when we are older. The children came up with some great ideas such as eat look after animals, drive a racing car, go to the desert, live in an apartment, move to France and so much more! We are looking forward to holding our first Careers Week starting on Monday. Thank you so much to those who have volunteered to talk to the children about their jobs. We can’t wait for the children to feel inspired to dream big.
Homework Menu
Please see the attached Homework menu (which is also on the class pages of the school website) and in book bags. These are great ideas to continue learning at home and as prompts for Show and Tell. Have fun!
Little Wandle (Phonics)
As before, Reception will continue to have daily phonics lessons. They will be taught 4 new grapheme phoneme correspondences (GPCs) per week, plus a review lesson on a Friday. The children will also learn a series of ‘tricky words’ (previously Harder to Read and Spell words). We will continue to assess your child every six weeks to check progress and will inform you of this assessment as normal in your child’s reading record.
READING (We have new, shiny books!)
This week we have introduced the children to the Reading Practice Sessions of Little Wandle. These consist of three timetabled sessions each week and are taught in small groups up to 6 children. Each group will read the same book three times because we want to develop fluency The more children see words, the more they begin to read them automatically without having to sound them out.
Session 1 – DECODING (sounding out the words).
Session 2 – PROSODY (reading with expression) – encouraging our children to read like writers.
Session 3 – COMPREHENSION (checking understanding of what has been read through questioning).
To start with, we have purchased six of each book from the Little Wandle library which means your child will share their Reading Teaching Session with five other children. That same book will then be sent home on a Friday for children to continue to read at home. ALL SIX books will need to be returned on time the following Wednesday for another group to use and take home. It is VITAL these are returned in good condition and on time to not affect learning of another group. We will be keeping a log book and parents will be asked to contribute to a replacement if they are not returned.
We will continue to use the Reading Records to note your child’s assigned books. It is important to use that the record is easy for families to complete so please leave a short comment in the record to let us know your child has read the books. We are always interested to hear how they got on especially as they put so much effort into their reading practice sessions in school. They are looking forward to showing off what they have learnt!
Supporting phonics at home
For further information on how to support your child with phonics, please visit the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds website: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
You will find a grapheme information sheet to help you with pronunciation. It is really important that you pronounce the sounds correctly at home if you are supporting your child. Please see videos on the link provided.
If you have any questions regarding phonics, please speak to your child’s class teacher. Thank you for your continued support.
In Kinetic Letters we have been practising some of the Fisher Family (Y, G, J) as well as some Slider Family letters (V, W, X). The Fisher Family letters all start from Scared Monkey and go underneath the line to ‘catch’ the fish from the pit. Take care when going under the ‘ground’ as you don’t want to go too far into the pit as Skip’s tail will get stuck in the mud! We tell the children that they are to go to the next scared monkey branch underneath. For Slider Family letters, we need to avoid starting with ‘down bump’, rather ‘sliding’ making a diagonal line to the ground. Keep practising your three friends hold pencil grip at home as this makes all the difference to your child’s writing.
On Wednesday, we held our Christmas Show and Tell which was super exciting! The children were very brave and told the class all about their toy and we had the opportunity to play and share our toys with each other! We were so impressed with how grown up they were. Well done Dormice and Hedgehogs.
On Thursday, we had a great PE session where we got out the climbing equipment in the hall. The children traversed the different stations by climbing, jumping and balancing on the beams. We already can’t wait until next week to be a little braver!
On Friday, we had our first Wake Up Shake Up of 2023 and what a blast we had dancing and moving to our favourite songs. In the afternoon we discussed the people that help us in our local community and afterwards drew a huge map of Tarporley. We drew and labelled the buildings that we find on the High Street and also sorted these jobs into day/night.
Our mystery reader this week was Harry’s Mum and Teddy’s Mum. Thank you for coming to share a story with us! Please speak to your child’s class teacher to put a date in the diary if you would like to be mystery reader. We still have many available dates this term so please get in touch if you would like a go!
Have a fantastic weekend!
Miss Selwyn and Miss Nicholas
