Curriculum overview

Welcome back everyone! We hope you had a restful break and are ready for the exciting weeks ahead. We have lots to look forward to this half term, including Comic Relief, Mother’s day and getting ready for Easter!

Unfortunately, we are unable to be at school at the moment, so please log on to google classroom to access our fun remote learning resources.

RE

Our RE topics for this half term are ‘Gathering’, ‘Lent’ ‘Growing’ and ‘Easter’. Children will discuss how they feel when they come together with friends and family, and learn how the church community gathers to celebrate the Mass. We will then learn about Lent and how it is a time to grow more like Jesus. We will make Lenten promises, which we will try our best to keep to.  We will learn about the Easter story, and will role play the main events, including Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

English

This half term in English, we will be doing shared reading and activities around our big books, which are: The Meanies came to school, The Ugly Duckling and Who will be my mother. We will also be sharing a breath of stories in class through individual reading sessions, guided reading sessions and class story times. When sharing stories, the children will be encouraged to talk about: the pictures, the characters and their feelings, the setting of the story and the sequence of events. Please read with your child at home every day, continue to help your child to use their word packs regularly and write in your child’s reading record on a regular basis.

In Phonics, we are now nearly at the end of Letters and Sounds Phase 3 and will commence Phase 4 very soon. Phase 4 does not introduce any new sounds, but reviews all the sounds we have learnt so far in the form of more complex words, with a focuses on words containing adjacent consonants.

We will have fun Phase 4 activities every day. Alongside this, we will continue to practise our Phase 2 and 3 sounds, and will continue to practice segmenting and blending our words to help us with our reading and writing. Please encourage and support your child to use their phonics when reading and writing at home, in order to consolidate what they have learnt at school. The sounds we have learnt are on google classroom.

The children have lots of opportunities to write and draw. We encourage children to form their letters correctly when writing. Please continue to support children in forming their letters correctly at home, according to the school’s handwriting policy.  We are also working on the correct use of capital letters, full stops and finger spaces when writing.

Communication and Language

All the children will be encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas with their classmates. Children will be supported to speak in full sentences in class and use as much interesting vocabulary as possible. When talking to your child at home, please encourage them to speak in full sentences, rather than giving one or two word answers.

We will continue to place a big emphasis on the development of language within our classroom, by providing children with a wide range of activities across the curriculum and modelling language and vocabulary as they play. We will also continue to support the children to develop their speech and language skills through the use of songs and stories.

Our talk topics for this half term are: Differences, Comic Relief and Our Garden.

Mathematics

Every day we have problem solving, reasoning and numeracy activities.  We will continue to teach the children to recognise, say and use numbers to 20 in the correct order. We will also continue learning to copy and make repeating patterns, make sets of different objects and discuss the methods used.

This half term we will be exploring practical measuring activities linked to: basic time (using o’clock), comparing weights, using language such as heavier/lighter and using bucket balance scales. We will also learn to: count in 2s, and 10s, explore mathematical vocabulary such as more and less, tall and short, before and next, and will explore and talk about 2D and 3D shapes and their properties.

We will also continue our work on practical addition and subtraction and start to focus more on how we can record our answer and show our working out. Please take any opportunity to reinforce number recognition and use and apply mathematical skills at home. Activities such as measuring when baking/cooking, counting toys as they are packed away or even recognising the numbers of television channels are all every day activities that involve maths!

Understanding of the World

Our topic for this half term is Life cycles and Growing.  Here, we will be learning about animals and their young, discussing where they live and learning the correct names of their offspring. We will focus on the lifecycle of a duck, which will link in with our English story The Ugly Duckling. We will learn all about ducklings and how to care for them.

We will also be learning about plants and how to grow them, as we will be sowing some seeds in preparation for our next topic after Easter. As we welcome Spring, we will go for a Spring walk, looking at beautiful flowers around our local area, such as cherry blossoms, tulips and daffodils.

The children will continue to use ICT to support their literacy and numeracy skills as well as creative work. Children have enjoyed learning from websites such as Busy Things, topmarks, phonicsplay and cbbc. We will focus on keyboard skills this half term, and children will be encouraged to type their name. We will also be teaching children about E-safety and how to stay safe online.

Don’t forget that you can now access Busy Things at home. Busy Things is an award-winning collection of educational games and activities that support learning and make it fun! Their activities are directly linked to the curriculum and we have used it lots in Chestnut class. Please take the time to explore this fantastic learning platform at home.

Expressive Arts and Design

Our artwork this half term centres around Spring, ducklings and Easter.  We will make observational drawings of flowers and plants, paint pictures of ducklings and make clay pots for Easter. We will continue to provide the children with a range of creative tools and materials to use in their artwork, such as paints, chalk, crayons, collage materials and pastels. We will also continue to enjoy messy play with playdough and shaving foam, and will also be doing some junk modelling.

Children will continue to have the opportunity to construct with a variety of construction toys, such as Duplo, K’nex, stickle bricks etc. When building, pupils are encouraged to think carefully about how to structure their model and talk about how they have constructed their model and why. We will now start to encourage children to label their models and write about them.

Children will be encouraged to think imaginatively and introduce narratives to their role play when playing in the home corner and small world table. We will promote the use of expression and gesture when storytelling and will encourage children to extend their storytelling skills through the use of drama.

Children have music lessons once a week. Alongside this, we explore a range of music genres in class, to enable children to build up a repertoire of songs. We encourage the children to dance expressively to music, and pupils will be given the opportunity to play percussion instruments.

Physical Development

We will continue to develop the children’s gross motor skills and core strength in our PE lessons, and through the use of our climbing frame, bicycles, and PE apparatus and equipment.

We will continue to support the children in further developing their fine motor skills through tactile activities with shaving foam and playdough, as well as through tasks involving threading and using tweezers. The children will be given lots of opportunities to write and draw with a variety of writing tools and materials and we shall be encouraging them to form all the letters correctly. If you would like to help your child with letter formation at home, please refer to the pre-school booklet you were given. Those children who are not quite ready for writing will practise fine motor control and mark making with a variety of writing tools.

Personal, Social and Emotional

We take every opportunity to encourage the children to be as independent as possible. We teach them to help one another and to ask their classmates for help when needed. We dedicate circles times to playing games and activities that teach them friendship skills, the importance of sharing and how to work as a team. We encourage children to talk about their emotions, give them strategies to manage their feelings and discuss the consequences of different actions.

Other Information

Don’t forget to continue using the supplementary resources on our Google Classroom to consolidate and extend school work.

We will continue to use the online learning journal Tapestry to record your child’s learning journey and development in Reception. Remember that you access this from home at any time to look at photographs, videos and notes following your child’s time at school.

Please ensure that all uniform is clearly labelled with your child’s name. Children have constant access to their water bottle throughout the school day, so it is important to wash and refill your child’s bottle every day.

If you have any questions or queries, please feel free talk to us after school or arrange an appointment at your convenience.