Noticeboard

• Please download the Tapestry app on your phone or tablet. We have now sent out the first part of your child’s learning diary. We are asking you to contribute to your child’s learning diary – please scroll down for more information.
• We look forward to welcoming you back to school on Monday 30th October 2023. 
• Our Reception Christmas play will be on Wednesday 6th December 2023 at 9:30am. 
• Please make sure your child has a coat in school every day. We will go outside even when it is cold and raining.
• Children need to bring their book bag into school every day. If they do not have it on a Monday, they will not be able to have a new reading book. Please make sure the reading books come into school each day with your child. 
• Your child will have come home with a Read for the Stars bookmark. You can find information on our reading incentive by clicking here. 
• Please do not allow your child to play with the resources that are on the Reception patio in the morning. These have been carefully positioned and are there to support your child’s learning during the school day.
• Firework Competition (click the image to get a copy). This year there is another exciting opportunity for 2 children in our school to be in charge of starting the fireworks at the Henleaze community firework extravaganza being held at our school on Saturday 4^th November. In order to be in with a chance of having this prestigious role, children in our school are invited to create their own firework picture on the attached template (or A4 paper if you do not have a printer at home) and to hand it to their class teacher by Monday 30^th October with their name and class clearly written so that Miss Quinn and I can judge the entries. Winners will be contacted on Tuesday 31^st October with details on the arrangements.

Celebrations

The children enjoyed using what they collected on their welly walk to make an autumn collage picture.

We also enjoyed welcoming the children from Claremont for patio play and this week they were using a parachute to roll a ball to each other as part of a sensory game for the children.

Questions from phonics learn-a-long

We only had 2 questions from the phonics learn-a-long which tells us that you are very well informed about reading and phonics at Henleaze Infant School.

How can we support our children with the concept of blending?

• Before blending to read, comes oral blending. Oral blending is when you say “c-a-t”, and your child can blend the phonemes together to say “cat”. You can play games with this at home by saying things like “can you point to the d-o-g?” when you are reading a story or “go and get your b-a-g”. This will support their sound discrimination. You can do this using phonemes that the children have not learned yet e.g. ch-air because it is the concept of blending, rather than reading.
• When reading with your child, you could model reading the phonemes and blending them together.
• Keep practising using the reading book. Reading books are set to match your child’s phoneme knowledge, therefore they should know the sounds the letters make, enabling them to focus on blending them together.
• If your child is not grasping blending, they may receive an intervention at school to support this. These are very fluid, especially at this time in the year as knowledge changes weekly, hence our constant phonics assessments! If your child is receiving intervention for this (or anything else!) regularly, your child’s class teacher will let you know at parents evening.

When do we teach a to sound different?

• Children will learn to learn alternative pronunciations in Year 1 and above which is where they will learn that a makes a different sound in c-a-t to watch.
• However, we imagine this question was due to segmenting the caption ‘a log hut’. At this stage we reduce cognitive overload by keeping the pronunciation the same for the word ‘a’, as the phoneme as they are both grammatically correct. When your child is at a reading stage when we feel they ready, we will introduce pronunciation for the word ‘a’ when we are reading 1:1 with your child and you can explain this at home too.
• We hope this makes sense but if not, please speak to your class teacher

Tapestry – Observation request

We are asking parents to contribute to their child’s learning diary (Tapestry) for the first time! The focus this week is PSED. 

Please create an observation and send us a photo or video of something your child is good at. You can also write about it in the comments section. We will celebrate these observations and achievements on our interactive whiteboards during our PSED lesson.

You can also send us any moments that you feel are significant in your child’s learning or want to share with your child’s class teachers.

Click the links below to find out how to add observations from different devices. 

Apple device Andriod device Desktop

This week’s learning

This week (and next), we will be learning about the ELLI Tortoise. The ELLI Tortoise doesn’t give up and keeps going when he finds things tricky. We talk to the children about ‘perseverance’, so please use this term with your child at home. Our key text to support learning is The Hare and the Tortoise.

To find out more about our ELLI animals, please click here. 

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

This week, the children will be talking about what they are good at and celebrating this with their peers. Please send in a Tapestry observation so we can share this too.

Communication and Language 

We will continue to share our All About Me Box. The children will listen to the story of the Hare and the Tortoise and talk about it together.

Word of the week: perseverance

Physical Development

For the next few weeks we will be going on a moon adventure during PE and exploring different ways of jumping and landing. 

In Write Dance this week we will be continuing with whole body movements making circles and eights.

Literacy

This week in Phonics, we will be learning the graphemes/ phonemes: j, v, w, x

And the common exception word: me

We will practise blending phonemes to read, and segmenting words to spell them using the phonemes and graphemes we have learned so far.

Writing:  We will practise labelling pictures by writing some consonant-vowel-consonant words such as dog, hat, bed, using the phonics we have been learning so far.

Maths

This week, the children will be learning about circles and triangles. They will be identifying and naming the shapes, as well as making comparisons between the two. Alongside this, we will be asking children to create bonfire night artwork using shapes.

Understanding the World 

The children will be researching all about tortoises, learning about where they like to live and what they like to eat. 

Religion and Worldviews

This week, we will be talking about feelings of joy, peace and wonder, and what makes us feel those things.

Expressive Arts and Design

We will be making bonfire art work using shapes and paint.