January 26, 2020

Year R have been busy bees since Christmas. Already this term we have covered our RE theme ‘Jesus as a storyteller’, started our journey through the story of ‘The Jolly Postman’ and celebrated Chinese New Year. 

The children were particularly enthused by Chinese New Year and learned lots about the differences between England and China, the different ways that Chinese New Year is celebrated and how Chinese people prepare for this special event. Thank you very much to Arthur’s Mum for coming in to speak to children. The week culminated in a celebration and more information and photos about this can be found on Tapestry.

So far in ‘The Jolly Postman’ he has delivered a letter from Goldilocks to The Three Bears. The children enjoyed a week’s learning based on this traditional tale, in particular investigating the textures of different cereals, learning songs involving high and low sounds to represent the bear’s voices in Music and acting out the story with their friends. 

We have now read on in the story and the Jolly Postman has just delivered a letter to the Witch, so next week our learning will be centred around ‘Hansel and Gretel’. We will focus on the journey that Hansel and Gretel take through the woods, leaving a trail of pebbles, and then their end destination – the gingerbread house! The children will make their own gingerbread house biscuit complete with sweetie decoration and this will lead to some descriptive writing.

Phonics

The children have settled well into their new phonics groups. Please continue to practise recognising the individual sounds by sight (letter side now, not the picture side) and building and reading words using the sound cards they have at home. These could be 3 letter words e.g. mat, words containing sounds like ‘sh’ e.g. ship, or for those children who have had set 2 sounds sent home, words containing these e.g. play.

Please also regularly practise reading their green or red key words by sight.

Handwriting

The children practise their handwriting daily when they first arrive at school before register. We have been working hard on the ‘One armed robots’ and ‘Curly caterpillar’ letters, so see if your child can show how it’s done!  Please note we form our ‘f’ slightly differently to this. You can refer to your child’s laminated handwriting card from their Summer activity pack for this.

The rhymes for these are as follows:

• One-armed robot letters “Swoop up for one leg, straight down for the other, up and over his arm.”
• Curly caterpillar letters “Up and over to his nose and all the way round to his toes.”