Dear parents and carers,

We hope that you had a lovely Christmas break. Welcome to the spring term where we look forward to the continuing partnerships between home and school.

Reading

Our goal is to create confident, fluent, independent readers. We prioritise reading at Latchmere School and have very carefully chosen the texts your child will study this term. We focus on word reading to develop fluency and encourage the whole class to join in through strategies such as choral reading (the whole class read together) and echo reading (the teacher models the reading and the class echo back). We also have the Latchmere Reading skills. In Reception these are based on decoding, prosody, comprehension and vocabulary.

In Reception, here are some of the texts we will be looking at in spring 1:

We will be continuing to embed the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonics programme. This involves daily teaching of phonics and three reading sessions per week for every child focusing on decoding, prosody and comprehension.

Please see the phonics page on the website for further information.

Maths

Our curriculum is based on the NCETM Mastering Number and White Rose Maths programmes. These research-based initiatives ensure that the skills and concepts children taught are fully embedded before moving on.

This half-term we will focus on:

• Continue to develop subitising and counting skills and explore the composition of numbers within and beyond 5.
• Ordinal numbers (first, second, etc).
• Composing and decomposing numbers and investigating part–part–whole relations, e.g. seeing that 5 can be made of 3 and 2.
• Using the language of ‘more than’, ‘fewer than’ and ‘an equal number’ to describe how many objects there are in each set.
• Begin to identify when two sets are equal or unequal and connect two equal groups to doubles.
• Comparing mass and capacity.

Curriculum Highlights

This half-term, we will be learning about ‘People who help us’ and ‘Winter’.

You can find out more information about the spring 1 learning by looking at the Reception medium term plan on the website.

Updates and Reminders

Morning routine – After the autumn term of “settling in”, this term we will be focusing on encouraging all Reception children to be as confident, independent and as “grown up” as they can possibly be. Therefore, in support of this, wherever possible, we would please ask you to say “Goodbye” to your child at the door and encourage them to come in with their belongings by themselves. This will greatly enhance and develop your child’s self-confidence.

Learning journeys – Your child will continue to focus on their own individual Learning Journey. Again, we will ask you to share your child’s “WOW” moments with us!  These provide an opportunity for you and your child to share, with the class, any significant moments in development and achievement, which you identify.

Reading practice books –These need to be brought into school every day and are taken in on a Friday. A new reading practice book is given out every Monday. If possible, could the book be protected in a wallet or plastic bag to stop water damage from leaking water bottles.

Named property – May we remind you to label ALL children’s clothing, snack pots and water bottles, etc with your child’s name.

Class PE – We ask that all children come to school in their PE kit on their PE day – PE shorts, T-shirt, plimsols/trainers and a school jumper/cardigan. In colder weather track suit bottoms (ideally as plain as possible and in a dark colour such as blue, black or grey) can be worn instead of shorts. 

PE days are:

Hedgehogs – Monday

Badgers & Foxes – Wednesday

Owls – Friday

Class Assemblies

Hedgehogs – 5th May

Badgers – 12th May

Foxes – 19th May

Owls – 26th May

Key dates

Fire Engine visit – Friday 6^th January (afternoon)

Bocketts Farm trip – Hedgehogs & Badgers – Wednesday 15^th March

Bocketts Farm trip – Owls & Foxes – Thursday 16^th March

Living Eggs in Reception – Monday 20^th March to Friday 31^st March

Egg Decorating in class – Thursday 30^th March (parents are invited into class to decorate an egg with their child in the afternoon) Further details about all of these events will be sent out nearer the time

Thank you in advance for all of your support in the year ahead.

 

Files

Reception Baseline – Information for Parents

Knowledge Organiser Reception Autumn 1 2022

Reception daily timetable