Noticeboard

• Please read below about the reading amnesty happening on Monday 31st March. As children will not be taking home books, we will provide children with 5 sheets with opportunities to continue practicing their reading skills at home. Please make sure you do one per day. You do not need to return these to school, but can if you want. 
• As always, it is a home clothes day on Friday (no uniform) as it is the last day of term. Donations for FHIS. 
• Thank you for signing up for donations of fruit. The children will be using these for observational drawings and making a fruit salad. 
• You may see some new faces at the classroom door – Miss Barrowcliffe (Daisy) and Miss Brunt (Buttercup). They are student teachers and will be welcoming the class and letting them out at the end of the day sometimes. Please be welcoming to them. 
• It is really important that you continue to read with your child every day. We are noticing that some parents have stopped reading regularly with their children. The children need daily practice to retain their learning. 
• Please alert your child’s class teacher when your child has filled up one side of their bookmark. 
• Please find the lunch menu by clicking here. 
• Please use the school calendar to find up-coming dates. 
• Please make sure your child has a coat in school every day. We will go outside even when it is cold and raining.
• 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.

Phonics book amnesty

We are looking to carry out an audit of our phonics books and are therefore asking that all phonics banded books are returned to school on Monday 31st March. Please can you support us by taking the time to have a thorough check around for any books that may have been mislaid around your home as well as handing in your child’s current books.

This will be a big undertaking and we are going to endeavour to get it completed during that week so that we can send books home again by the end of the week for the Easter holidays. 

We recognise that this means that you will not be able to read the phonics books with your child during this week. We therefore ask that you continue to keep the regular reading routine going by reading stories to your child in the time that you would normally hear them read. 

Thank you for your support with this.

Celebrations

The children have loved learning about Ghana using the Anansi and the Golden Pot story for the past 2 weeks. This week, they explored more vocabulary and tasted Ghanaian foods, including red-red stew. The children were able to identify the taste of ginger and a little bit of spice too. 

Tapestry observation request 

The focus this week is writing. Please ask your child to write a list of their favourite fruits (at least 5) using their phonics knowledge and the sounds we have learnt e.g. graips (grapes), orinj (orange). Then, send us a photo. Please encourage your child to hold their pencil using a tripod grip, form the letters correctly and encourage them to use the phonics mats at the back of their reading diary (have out while they are doing the writing). 

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

Star of the Week 

Daisy Class – Nora

Buttercup Class – William

This week’s learning

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

This week we are listening carefully to clues that will lead us on a treasure hunt. Children will have to work out from the clues where in the school building the teachers are describing. 

Communication and Language

Book of the week: Handa’s Surprise by Eileen Browne

We will use our storytimes to engage in these ways:

Listen to and talk about stories to build familiarity and understanding. 

Ask questions to find out more and to check they understand what is being said. 

Articulate their ideas and thoughts in well-formed sentences. 

Connect one idea or action to another using a range of connectives. 

Describe some events in detail.

Word of the week: observation

Physical development

We will continue with the ‘on the farm’ theme and the focus this week is using big shapes and large movements. 

Literacy

This week in Phonics, we will learn Phase 4 words with adjacent consonants: mp, nd, nk, nt

And the common exception words: was, do, so, like

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 be using our phonics learning to retell the story of Handa’s Surprise..

Maths

This week, the children will learn about numbers that are higher than 20, spotting patterns. They’ll also have a chance to do some Easter maths on Friday!

Understanding the World

This week, we will be rounding up our learning from the past term and children will be comparing hot places, like Ghana and Kenya, to cold places like Antarctica.

Expressive Art and Design

We will be using the fruits that you have kindly donated to do our art and DT. In art, the children will be doing observational drawings of fruits in a basket, like the ones Handa took to her friend, using oil pastels. Once they have done this, we will be cutting them up and using them to make a fruit salad and then eating it!

Religion and Worldviews

For our final lesson exploring “Why are some times special?” we will learn about the Hindu festival of Holi.

In our EYFS assembly this week, we will learn about different Easter traditions in the UK.