We are incredibly proud of our Reception children as they have worked so hard in their learning, keeping up with all the golden rules, including being kind, being safe and having a go! They have already mastered writing their name independently, so well done Reception!
This blog is to give you an overview of the learning that will be happening this term.
During this Spring term the children will be learning through our topics:
- Winter and Spring
- Animals
- Celebrations
- Easter
- Dreams and Goals
- Healthy Me
In Literacy, we will be reading some great stories such as Snowmen and Night, Polar Bear Polar Bear, The Hungry Caterpillar and The Little Red Hen. The children will learn to talk about and retell stories using actions. We will continue developing reading and writing by applying phonic knowledge where the children are continuing to develop forming letters, spell words that match their spoken sound and read and write simple sentences. It is important that your child is read to often as this will help reinforce and embed phonic awareness and expand their joy for reading. Reading books are changed on a Tuesday and Friday.
In Communication and Language, we will continue to spend lots of time focusing on speaking and listening so the children learn to understand how to listen carefully and why listening is important. This will be developed further through their own play and continuous provision that will provide opportunities for them to articulate their ideas and thoughts, use talk to help work out problems and develop social phrases.
In RE, our theme is ‘Celebrations’ and we will be focusing on different celebrations from around the world, such as New Year, Chinese New Year and Nowruz. We will be learning about all the different ways in which different countries and cultures celebrate their New Year and how we celebrate at home. In the second half of the term our theme is ‘Easter’ and this will provide opportunities for the children to learn about this significant event in the Christian calendar.
At St Michael’s we have 7 school values: Respect, Love, Hope, Peace, Trust, Joy and Resilience. This term we will start the year by learning about the value of ‘Respect’ as well as ‘Resilience’ and this half term our focus will be ‘Love’.
In Maths, we are learning all about numbers through our ‘ACLIC’ programme, which stands for:
- Amounts
- Counting
- Learn Its
- It’s Nothing New
- Calculation
The aim with this programme is to develop the children’s mental maths skills in a fun and exciting way. Our maths objectives for the Spring Term are:
- Introducing zero
- Comparing numbers to 10
- Composition of 4 & 5
- Combining to groups (addition)
- Number bonds to 10
- Comparing mass & capacity
- Length & height
- Time
- 3d shapes
- Pattern
Please reinforce this learning at home, as well as the following ‘Learn Its’ which we would like the children to know off by heart:
- 1 + 1 = 2
- 2 + 2 = 4
- 3 + 3 = 6
- 4 + 4 = 8
- 5 + 5 = 10
During our Personal, Social and Emotional Development, we will continue to learn to build constructive and respectful relationships, as well as learning to express our feelings and consider the feelings of others. The reception children have opportunities to enhance their development in this area through play, continuous provision and with each other. We will be supporting this even further through our Jigsaw PSHE lessons which will be covering the topics ‘Dreams and Goals’ and ‘Healthy Me’.
Our Physical development focus is Gymnastics. The children will engage in fun and challenging gymnastic activities that will support them to develop body strength, balance, co-ordination and agility. This will support the children to combine different movements to progress towards a fluent style of moving. Reception PE is on a Tuesday morning, so please remember to come to school ready to go in your school tracksuit.
In our Understanding of the World we will be learning about the seasons of winter and spring and recognising the differences in the seasons as well as using our senses to explore these seasons. We will also be learning about animals, their habitats and their life cycles. We will have the exciting opportunity of observing the real-life life cycle of caterpillars and chicks!
In Expressive Arts and Design, the children will engage in a range of creative learning including designing clothes for our snowmen, creating unique snowflakes, ice painting and learning lots of new songs and dances relating to winter and animals.