Squirrel Class - Year R

Welcome to Squirrel Class (Year R).

Teacher : Mrs Gibbons

Our Learning in Pictures

Please click to view some snapshots of Squirrel's learning in action so far this year.

Click here for Tapestry

Useful Information

PE day: Thursday

Please remember to come into school in your PE kit on these days, as well as removing earrings and tying back long hair.

We will be outside for P.E this term practising our ball skills. Please ensure they have suitable clothing for outside.

Changing reading books: Reading for pleasure books are changed every Friday. The children will have the choice out of the school library books. The children's phonics matched book will be collected in at the start of the week, and their new one will be given towards the end of the week. Please read through this together at least once through the weekend.

Home learning

On a weekly basis, we would expect the children to complete the following activity.

Reading: Daily practice or storytime (This can be either their reading for pleasure book, a phonic matched book (at least once), or stories from home. Please log this into their reading record as we check and record these each week.

Focus Home Learning this Week:

Please check your tapestry account for the latest home learning tasks and ideas.

Maths Learning

We will be practising our careful counting skills up to, and past, 20.

We will be using 'counting wands' to help make sure we count an object/ action only once to find the amount.

We have been learning to subitise more complex arrangements in our Maths sessions.

This is where the children view and say the amount without counting.

See if you can quickly say the amount that flashes in the video without counting first.

We have been using numberblock characters to support our understanding of compositions of numbers.

Children will use sentences such as:

4 and 2 makes 6

3 and 3 makes 6

Phonics Learning

We have learnt some Phase 3 sounds and will be consolidating these during the Summer terms. We would expect children to be confident recognising and applying the phase 2 and phase 3 sounds, by the end of their reception academic year.

Children will be using these digraphs when developing their spelling. Please do not expect children to know the correct spellings for all words, we encourage children to spell phonetically (using only the graphemes they have learnt to date).

Home Leaning- Phonics (Little Wandle)

You may have noticed a phonics pack in your child's bag from school.

Their pack contains focus phonic sounds that we have learnt this week, as well as some tricky word cards.

Please spend some time with your child to go over these sounds and how we write these.

They may use the following words when talking about their phonics learning:

- phoneme (the sound it makes)

- grapheme (the written letter/s)

There is also a booklet of all the phase 2 and 3 sounds that they will be learning with the corresponding writing rhyme. Please encourage the use of these rhymes when your child is practising the letter formation.

This does not have to be done with pen and paper. They could practice writing the graphemes with paint, in flour, mud, sand, or even ketchup! Feel free to get creative with this, so it suits what you have at home but so it can also be an enjoyable task for you to do together.

You may want to go on a sound hunt and find objects that start with our focus phonemes (e.g. s- sun, soup, slipper). This could be done around the home, garden, on a walk, or even during your food shop!

We do go through and teach these sounds throughout the week, but the power of additional home practice is very beneficial, so we do encourage this additional exposure to their learning as much as possible.

If you would like to check or go through any of this together, please don't hesitate to ask. The staff in school are always happy to help.

Please share photos/ videos of your home learning. We would love to see how they are doing with this.

Please click on the picture for the website link

Tattershall Primary School