We hope that you all enjoyed a fun, yet restful Half Term. The children came back very well and were all very excited to see each other and share their adventures with us, including their Autumn Walks! 

We enjoyed the opportunity to meet virtually with some of you before the Half Term holiday to share and celebrate your child’s successes since starting school, and are looking forward to chatting with the rest of you this week and next week.

After we have met with you please can we remind you to add a comment to the Tapestry post we sent out before your meeting? This was the post containing photos of your child’s work, and their responses to our questions. If you have your meeting next Wednesday 11th November we will send this out next week. 

Here is the Newsletter for this Half term: Year R newsletter Autumn 2 2020

As always, please do speak to us in person or send us an email if you have a question.

Thank you for your continued support,

The Year R Team.

At St Mark’s we are keen to promote strong links between home and school and to also recognise children’s achievements in both settings.

We would really like Tapestry to be a collaborative effort between staff at school and parents and carers at home. It’s been lovely to read your comments to our observations sent home so far. Please continue to share your thoughts!

In addition it would be great to begin to see observations which you have made at home. You can upload your own observations and then your child can share their home learning with the whole class.

These observations can either be WOW moments, or just updates of home learning, which we also love to see! It is really useful to know if children are practising new skills, phonic sounds, Maths concepts or demonstrating their understanding of a topic or theme at home. 

A WOW moment would be something that you feel is a particular achievement or a ‘first’ e.g.

• Riding their bike without stabilisers for the first time.

• Completing some independent writing; hearing and recording sounds in the words.

• Picking up a book and attempting to sound out a word for the first time.

• Being brave and trying something new for the first time 

Instructions for how to write and send an observation can be found in these simple user guides:

Click here for Android guide  

Click here for iOS guide

We look forward to finding out what the children are achieving at home.

Year R Team

All of the children have settled so well over the past 3 weeks! We are so proud of how well they have learnt the class rules and routines and how they have settled into life in Year R. It has been wonderful to see them all making new friends and playing so nicely together during Discovery Time. We have really enjoyed getting to know your children better; we really are such lucky teachers!

Now we have had a settling in period, we are ready to begin our Phonics and Maths teaching next week!

Before we begin, we have recorded two information videos which explain our approach to teaching English and Maths in Year R. We hope that you find them useful and you feel better informed about how you can support your child at home. 

English teaching in Year R: Phonics, Reading and Writing

Maths teaching in Year R: Mastery Approach

In addition to these two videos here are a few links we think will also help:

Phonic Sound pronunciation – how to correctly say the sounds

Handwriting family demonstrations

Curly Caterpillar Letters

One Armed Robot Letters

Long Ladder Letters

Zig Zag Letters

If you have any questions, please do email us at yearr@stmarksce.org.uk.