Dear Parents, Wishing you all a very Happy New Year! We hope you all had a lovely holiday. We have an exciting term ahead of us with special events such as Enterprise Week and World book day. We have begun the year with a topic called ‘May the force be with you’! The children will be learning about forces and movement through investigating ways to make things speed up, slow down and change direction. They’ll also develop skills in creating moving pictures and toys thinking about how to make them move. After half term the topic will change into ‘Making connections’ finding out about electricity. The children continue to have daily literacy, phonics and guided reading lessons. In literacy we’re looking at traditional stories comparing different traditional stories, looking at characters within them before writing out own stories. The children are increasing their knowledge of different spelling patterns for sounds they already know and in the daily phonics lessons will continue to learn and practice reading and spelling using these spelling patterns. The children also have weekly spellings to take home and learn. Please help your child to learn these and have their book in school each Tuesday for testing. We are going to have a focus on handwriting this term, making sure children are always using neat handwriting and forming letters correctly. Thank you for hearing your child read regularly. Please keep up the regular reading, it doesn’t have to be for long. In the daily numeracy lessons children are increasing their number knowledge by reading, writing and working with larger numbers going beyond 100. They’ll be developing skills in ways to add and subtract mentally using skills such as partitioning numbers and knowing number pairs to make 20 and 100. The children are becoming familiar with their 2, 5 and 10 times tables, any work on learning and remembering times tables would be very helpful. The class blog has many links to games the children can play to help them with numeracy skills, but real life experiences are also helpful such as using money, weighing and exploring the capacity of objects. We are lucky to have Mr Phipps helping us with our netball skills – please make sure the children have a PE kit in school and, as it is now a tracksuit (trousers and top) might be useful. Your child is getting more confident and independent, please do help and encourage them to be independent by allowing them to sort themselves out in the morning. If you ever have any questions or queries please don’t hesitate to get in contact either briefly in the mornings or organise to meet after school or by email. Best wishes
Julia Ives
Hazel Moscrop
Lynne Hargreaves
Sharna Wirtzfeld