Reception Curriculum Letter

Jurassic Coast Base Autumn Term 2010 15th September 2010 Dear Parents, Welcome to the first curriculum letter of the year from Jurassic Coast Base. This letter is to tell you about the activities we have planned for this term and ways you may be able to support your child’s learning at home.

Thank you all so much for making Miss Pearce and me so welcome when we came to visit you and your child at home. It was lovely to be able to meet all the children again in a familiar environment before their first day at school. The children have really impressed me this week, they have been settled and calm and have been extremely sensible at lunchtimes too. They all seem settled and happy- I am really looking forward to all the exciting things we will be doing together!

When the children arrive in the morning Room 2 will be shut and first thing activities will take place in Elmer Room, you can take them into Room 2 in order to change their book. We will then open Room 2 and the outside area once we have talked about the day together and I have taken the register. The children will be able to use the outside area every day but as it starts to colder and probably wetter we would like the children to have a pair of wellies or old shoes which they can get wet and muddy and of course waterproof coats, hats and gloves if needed!! Thank you to those of you that have provided these already please come and see me if you need to talk to me about any of this.

As you will have read in your Reception handbook, Reception is part of The Early Years Foundation Stage ( EYFS ) this is the stage of children’s development from birth to the end of their reception year in school.

The EYFS Framework describes how early years practitioners should work with children and their families to support their development and learning. By following the EYFS children are offered a principled play based approach to learning and development.

What are the EYFS principles?

Theme: A Unique Child Principle: Every child is a competent learner from birth who can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured.

Theme: Positive Relationships Principle: Children learn to be strong and independent from a base of loving and secure relationships with parents and/or a key person.

Theme: Enabling Environments Principle: The environment plays a key role in supporting and extending children’s development and learning.

Theme: Learning and Development Principle: Children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates and all areas of Learning and Development are equally important and interconnected.

The principles underpin all that practitioners are required to do. Young children learn best through play and through careful observation they are provided with appropriate play and learning experiences. The activities they engage in underpin all the skills they need to work towards the Early Learning Goals in the following areas of learning: Personal, social and emotional development Communication, language and literacy Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy Knowledge and understanding of the world Creative development Physical development During the early part of this term one of our main focuses is on the on the personal, social and emotional aspect of learning as our priority is to ensure that all the children settle in happily and feel safe and secure in school. This work will be based on this term’s SEAL theme of New Beginnings - this will include discovering all the learning areas in our classroom and becoming really familiar with our daily routine and organisation as this will help to ensure that they all feel secure and settled in their new classroom and with each other and us. We will also be learning how to tell others when we feel happy and sad. They will be getting to know each other and us really well and as part of this we will share the lovely ‘All about me ‘books that the children have worked so hard on during the holidays- they are all fabulous – thank you for your help with this. We will also be talking about how we can keep our classroom a safe and happy place and how we look after each other and the classroom.

Our learning this term will begin with developing the theme of ‘Me, my friends and my family’ as this links with our SEAL work. We will be focusing on speaking and listening skills this term as well as providing lots of opportunities for using writing inside and outside our classroom. We will also be making sure we can recognize our own names and start to write them ourselves. At home you can encourage your child to write whenever possible –making lists, taking messages, making cards, invitations , letters to friend at school or maybe they could watch you write a list or take a phone message, send an email or text message!!! We will be reading lots of nursery rhymes and talking about rhyming words.

During this term I will start to send home reading books. The children will bring home a book to share from our class book corner and a ‘reading’ book .At the moment the children are bringing home a book from the book corner and you can help them choose a new book each morning when they arrive at school – thank you. The book box is in Room 2.You have also received a home /school reading book in which we can communicate with each other about your child’s reading. Please bring in your child’s book bag every day- thank you. I intend to hold a short meeting to explain about our phonics teaching and the reading in more detail and I will send out the details soon.

We will also be starting our phonics (letter sounds) work this term and again I will explain more about this at the reading meeting, but the children will be bringing home a book of sounds to practice at home.

To further support our reading and writing and sound work we will be sending home our class bears- Milly, Billy and Bobby. Every weekend three children will take one of the bears home, they will have a diary to write or draw in and also a game or activity to do. Please give them plenty of time and encouragement to do this themselves and then the children can bring them back on Monday and share the diary with us.

As our class is named Jurassic Coast Base part of our work this term will also be finding out about dinosaurs - we will start this by finding out what dinosaur facts the children already know and then what we would like to find out and then deciding together how we will develop this work.

The majority of our number work this term will focus on sorting, matching and counting activities. You can support this at home by, for example counting cars as you drive along, getting 3 or 6 fruits at the fruit shop, sorting out pairs of socks in the washing basket. Try spotting numbers when you are out in town or in the car. We will also be exploring all sorts of patterns - number and shape patterns, patterns all around us - in school, in the natural world, in the environment , word and letter patterns and sound patterns.

You could talk to your child at home and when you are out about different patterns you could introduce some of the language of pattern such as straight lines, zigzags, spots, stripes, checks, spirals and reinforce the names of basic shapes such as circle, square, triangle, rectangle etc .Later in the term we will be talking about the changing seasons and looking for signs of autumn as well as investigating night and day and autumn festivals.

As we find out and talk about different things you can support your child by talking about the themes and ideas we are exploring in class at home and encouraging them to look for things at home to show us. I will keep you informed on our class blog and on our notice board about our weekly learning.

During our P.E lessons there will be a mixture of basic skills outside while the weather is still good and indoor gymnastics. We do of course spend time on getting changed carefully and organizing our clothes you can support this by encouraging your child with dressing and undressing themselves. As I mentioned during the home visits it would be most helpful if you could leave the P.E kit in school all week as this means we can be flexible with our P.E sessions-thank you.

We want the children to become happy, independent learners and workers this year and you can support this especially when they are getting dressed, tidying up and bringing their things into school-encourage them to hang their own things up and put their book bags away themselves. As I mentioned during the meeting in the summer I am happy for the children to bring in something small from home to show us all.

There is a table near my chair and as long as the toy /object is not too big then they can bring it in with them, the rule is that it does stay in there during the morning so it will be safe – please come and see me if you wish to talk about this .

We have a parents notice board in our classroom just by the inside door ‘ Jurassic Coast Base Notices’ and we will put up any relevant messages or notices here so please try to check it each morning- thank you.

Please remember to let us know who your child will be going home with if there is a change from the usual routine - thank you. Please check your child’s book bag each day for letters and messages – thank you.

Here are some useful websites http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/websites/eyfs/ http://www.crickweb.co.uk/Early-Years.html Lastly, as I said during the home visits I am always available to answer questions, explain things or just to chat!! I am very much looking forward to the coming year and working in partnership with you to give your children a super start to their school career.

Best wishes,

Mrs S Flavell and Miss K Pearce