Week Ending 21/04/23
Date: 20th Apr 2023 @ 6:06pm
Happy Friday and welcome back to the final term of Reception! I can’t believe I am saying those words but there’s still time lots of fun still to come! Summer is one of the best terms to be a 4/5-year-old as the sun begins to shine down on us, the list of memories gets longer. Well done to everyone that completed the Easter Challenge Booklet, we were so impressed with how eager the children were to continue their learning over the holidays.
A Polite Request
Please may we remind you that as the days get warmer, ensure your child brings in a water bottle, a sun hat and apply suncream before school. All of which should be labelled. If your child requires a top up through the day we advise the roll on sun creams which your child can independently apply themselves. Thank you.
Dates for the diary this half term:
Monday 1st May- School Closed (May Day)
Monday 8th May – School Closed (King’s Coronation)
Wednesday 24th May – EYFS Sports Day 9am – 10am (weather permitting). We ask that your child come to school in either a yellow, red, blue or green top, this is dependent on which coloured house your child is in.
Beeston – RED
Cholmondeley – BLUE
Peckforton – GREEN
Chester – YELLOW
If your child doesn’t know which house they are in, just ask them which coloured house points they put in their pot and this should give you the answer! Alternatively, please come and see us and we can confirm.
Save the date - Park Hall Farm Trip (rescheduled for Tuesday 13th June)
As you are aware we were unable to go on our Autumn school trip to Park Hall Farm due to the weather conditions at the time. We are happy to announce we have managed to find a date next half term. This will now take place on Tuesday 13th June. The children will need a packed lunch, comfortable walking shoes and trousers. Please ensure they wear a school jumper to identification purposes. Thank you for your patience and understanding with this.
Talking Point – Earth Day and The Green King!
Tomorrow is Earth Day where the official theme for 2023 is ‘Invest in Our Planet’. As we have been learning about where our vegetables come from this week, we thought it might be a lovely link to God’s World. King Charles III is a committed environmentalist with a long history of campaigning for better conservation, organic farming and tackling climate change. Our Big Question this week is ‘what would you do if you were King or Queen?’ Maybe you could make a list of actions you would take and bring them in for Show and Tell.
Little Wandle (Phonics)
This term we move onto Phase 4 in our phonics journey! The children do not learn any new phonemes or graphemes. Instead, they are taught to further manipulate the phonemes and graphemes they have already learnt. They will begin to explore more polysyllabic words (words containing more than one syllable) and read and spell words containing adjacent consonants. E.g. string, milk, brush, scoop etc. Phase 4 requires the children to blend an increasing number of sounds together. These words are often referred to in relation to how many vowels and consonants they contain.
E.g. CVC words (consonant / vowel / consonant) such as sad, net, him.
This week we have been focusing on CVCC words (consonant / vowel / consonant / consonant) such as went, help, tent etc. We have also learnt the tricky words said, so, have, like.
As always, please see the downloadable attachment below to practise the CVCC words and tricky words we have been learning this week.
A slight change
This term we have had to move our final reading practice session due to Year 4 having brass lessons in the morning and celebration assembly having to be moved. As a result, we will be doing this final read with your child on a THURSDAY. This will then make it easier for you to return all of your books for them to be exchanged. From next week please can you ensure ALL THREE books are returned in your child’s book bag for a THURSDAY. We will be logging each book your child takes home and will send reminders if we do not have the Big Cat Collins book back in particular.
Please be aware that celebration assembly is now 9:30am due to this.
In Maths, we have been focussing on recalling 2D shapes and identifying the names of 3D shapes which are fat versions of the shapes we already know. The common 3D shapes we have been looking at are sphere, cylinder, cone, pyramid, cube, cuboid and triangular prism. A great activity that reinforces shape names is a 3D shape hunt around the house or even on your daily walk to school. We have focused on using the term 'face' and just like us 3D shapes have faces with 2D shapes (the shapes that can be found in 'Flatland'. It has been tricky to distinguish between the 2D shapes we know and now the 3D shapes we have learnt so we will be incorporating this into daily activities to reinforce this concept.
On Monday, we started our week on food poetry! We gave the children clues as part of a riddle to hunt for vegetables in the school grounds.
On Tuesday, we shared with the children a range of riddles and they had to guess which vegetables we were describing. We asked them to reason how they knew using the vocabulary from the poem. We then sorted the vegetables into those which grow above and those vegetables that grow below ground.
On Wednesday, we used our senses (hear, see, smell, taste and feel) to describe a range of vegetables. We worked in groups with a vegetable to come up with lots of ideas together to expand our growing vocabulary.
On Thursday, we used everything we had learnt this week to write our own riddles for a vegetable. The children then read their poems to the class and we had to guess the vegetable they had chosen.
On Friday, we held our annual traditional Easter bonnet parade around the school grounds. Well done to all of our KS1 and EYFS children on designing and creating such beautiful bonnets. You can find these photos on our Twitter page and on Tapestry.
Congratulations to our Stars of the Week, Ollie H and Daniel!
Our mystery readers this week were Violette’s Grandma and Grace’s Mum. Thank you for coming to share your 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, please get in touch if you can help!
Have a lovely weekend!
Miss Selwyn and Miss Nicholas
