We’ve made it – our first half term in Reception is complete. We’ve been on quite a journey since getting to know each other during our home visits in September and have learnt so much already. The children have settled wonderfully into their new surroundings and are happy, content and prepared for their learning challenges ahead. It was brilliant to see so many of your at the Family Friday morning today; thank you for the kind feedback we received. We are delighted that the children are entering school happy and talking at home so positively about what they are learning.
This week: We read Rosie’s walk and thought about the journey she went on. Many of our Rainbow Challenges were linked to the story, where we explored drawing maps and building the story setting out of construction materials. We also looked at autumn leaves and the colours associated with the season. We became artists and discussed light and dark tones and how to skilfully mix red and yellow together to make different shades of orange for our autumn leaf artwork.
Next Week: After half-term we will be starting our first topic. From now on each term will have a theme for which our learning and discussions will focus on. Next half-term’s topic is Celebrations. Each week we will look at different types of festivals or ways/what people around the world celebrate. Our first week will be very loosely linked to Hallowe’en. We will not teach the children about Halloween, but discuss how some people like to dress-up at this time of the year in funny costumes.
Key Things to know…
Book Focus: Meg and Mog
Group Time Focus: Reading CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant).
Maths Focus: Adding two groups together to make a total.
Phonics Focus: sounds M (Maise mountain, mountain), and d (around the dinosaurs bottom, up his tall neck and down his toes.
Rainbow Challenges (independent, open-ended provision)
Red Challenge – To Weave Ribbon in and out of a spider’s web.
Blue Challenge – To follow a recipe to add ingredients for Meg’s potion
Yellow Challenge – A sound hunt. Find/draw/write objects that start with… s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d.
Green Challenge (outside) – Move to ‘magical’ sounding music. Create a dance as Meg and Mog
Purple Challenge – (Outside Big Construction) – Build a house for Meg and Mog.
FOCUS
Last Monday FOCUS met for their AGM. It was amazing to hear all about the great work that FOCUS have done for our school and how much money they were able to raise to support your children in their learning; we are grateful for such an active parent association. Highlights of the year were the purchasing of the mini bus and it is not an overstatement to say that without FOCUS we would not have this wonderful resource. Mr Drane has already started to make great use of this in transporting children to and from competitions and we foresee many more opportunities to hit the road in our new school bus. Many exciting events are planned in the diary already for this year in order to raise funds for school and the children and we cannot wait to be involved and we hope you will want to be involved too!
The success of FOCUS can only continue with the involvement of volunteers so please get involved in any way you can. If you would like to know more about how to be involved with FOCUS, or about the committee positions available or simply to offer help and assistance in some events then please email focus@universityprimaryschool.org.uk for more details. Role descriptions are available and FOCUS are always grateful for any help that you can offer in organising events and fund raisers for your children.
Thank you
Mr Smith, Mr Drane, Mrs Durning
Date for the diary
We warmly invite all parents to a Reception Information Meeting on Monday 5th November 2018 at 2:15. The session will commence at by 3pm to allow teachers and parents to return to class for home time dismissal. During this meeting we will discuss commonly asked questions, the daily timetable, online learning journeys (Tapestry) and home reading books. We hope many of you can make it. For working parents who may not be able to attend at this time, we will ensure we put any slides on the BLOG at the end of that week.
We hope you all have a lovely, fun and autumnal half-term.