Weekly News! 10.1.25!
Happy New Year! Welcome back to term 3, we hope you had a lovely Christmas break. We have had a great first week back in reception.
RWI
We are currently revisiting Set 1 sounds to reinforce their understanding and speedy recall. This recap is vital as it lays a strong foundation for their reading skills.
Most groups are now being introduced to set 2 sounds. Please see attached set 2 sounds which are all special friends. This is an exciting step as it will enable them to read and spell an even wider range of words. Most groups are now focusing on reading Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) words using “Fred Talk”. This method involves sounding out the individual sounds of a word before blending them together to read. Supporting your child with this at home can be very beneficial. Ask them to use “Fred Talk” when sounding out words during reading time, and encourage them to blend the sounds together to form words.
Additionally, we have introduced ‘red words’ into our learning. These are words that cannot be decoded using Fred Talk, meaning your child will need to learn them by sight. Examples include ‘the’, ‘no, and ‘of. Practising these red words regularly will help improve their reading fluency.
Maths
This week, we have been focusing on counting beyond 20, which can be quite an adventure for our little learners! Encouraging your child to count objects around the home, such as toys, snacks, or even steps as they walk, will not only help them become more confident in their counting abilities but also aid them in recognising numbers in everyday life.
Looking for patterns in numbers was another key area of focus. Children love spotting patterns, whether it’s the stripes on a shirt or the steps on a staircase! We explored these patterns through a hundred square, we saw that the numbers got bigger as we went up, and going down each column shows the same ones digit number eg 1, 11, 21, 31 etc.
Estimating is another skill which we explored to develop our number sense. Using what we know, we estimated amounts, remembering that estimating is having a clever guess. We were great at estimating this week, even though we didn’t get the answer ‘right’ every time, we knew this was ok!
Finally, we will explored the concepts of one more and one less. We learnt that one more is the next number we count along and one less is the previous number counted.
Next week we will be exploring the composition of numbers 1,2,3.
Thematic
This week has been a values week where we focused on the school value of courage. We learnt about artist Chuck Close who showed courage when he became paralysed as an adult. Rather than give up, Chuck Close relearnt how to create his art by strapping a paintbrush to his wrist to paint.
We practiced painting using this method and discussed how tricky it was to have control when it was strapped to our wrists.
In class we had an art gallery where we explored a range of Chuck Close’s artwork, we discussed the things we like and dislike about the artwork.
At the end of the week we created our own art using Chuck Close’s technique of colouring smaller circles within a picture.
