Author: Mrs Solakova

Letters and Sounds

Today I collected your child’s Letters and Sounds book.  I will collect the books every Thursday and return them on Friday with our new Letters and Sounds learning and sounds added.

I hope you are finding the books useful at home.   This week we have started using magnetic letters to begin to read and spell simple words eg. as, it, is, an, at, map, pat, tap, tip, pip, sat, sit.  All words that use the sounds we have learnt so far.  Thank you for all your support helping your child learn to read at home, I was so impressed at the children’s progress.

For those children who may already be aware of our new sounds, please concentrate on learning to form the letter using the school cursive script.  We call it our ‘whoosh’ writing.  Details are in the Letters and Sounds book. This will really support your child’s future writing skills. 

If your child is not quite ready to hold a pen and write yet, concentrate on lots of hand/ finger skills to develop the small muscles in your child’s hands and fingers.  For example, cooking, gardening, getting dressed/undressed (especially buttons) or doing up their coat zip.

This week I introduced a game on a website called Phonics Play www.phonicsplay.co.uk

The Phonics Play website has some fantastic phonics games.   Whilst there is a subscription charge, this is currently being halved and some games are free. Reception children are currently working on Phase 2 so just click on the Phase 2 games.

Precautionary note:   Remember e-safety supervision. St. Adrian’s  website includes a useful e-safety advice  link.

Here is another game we have played in class today.  You may wish to have a go at home.

Which One?

Lay out a selection of familiar objects with names that contain three sounds (e.g. bus, pig, pen, cup, dog).

Check your child can recognise each object.

Ask your child to listen carefully while you sound talk the name of one of the objects, leaving a short gap between each sound eg. b-u-s

Help your child to put the sounds together and say the word and identify the object.

Once your child can confidently listen to your ‘sound talking’ and blend the sounds together, perhaps your child may like to have a go at ‘sound talking’ each object.  This will help your child learn to spell words using their knowledge of phonics.

I am currently organising my routine to set a weekly ‘changing reading books’ day.  Next week I will change the reading books and words strips on Monday.  Books and other reading materials will then be changed on Tuesdays.   Please do let me know if you feel your child needs new books at any other time.   However, ensure you read each book with your child at least three times before requesting a new book This will help build confidence, fluency and comprehension. Spend 10 minutes each day if possible, frequent and short is best. 

Thank you again for all your support.

Nicola Palmer

Some of the children were fascinated by insects we discovered in the garden. This generated many enquiries about all the different types of bugs, what they eat, where they live etc. The children played with our ‘big bug’ set and we used a bug chart to find out the name of each bug. This was a good opportunity for the children to make comparisons and look at differences and similarities.

We have been exploring many messy play opportunities such as ‘gloop’ (cornflour, water and food colouring). This inspired the children’s inquisitive minds and they decided to add bubbly water and recreate a volcano. Watch this space for more scientific experiments!

Our creativity table has been very popular and the children have been learning many basic techniques such as joining, sticking and decorating. We have been encouraging the children to plan with a purpose in mind. Treasure boxes being a popular choice this week.

Today the children experienced a fun rainy day. We used powder paints and washing up liquid in the puddles to mix bubbly colours. A good opportunity to develop the children’s fine motor skills (small muscles in hands and fingers). Not to mention the finger skills required when changing into dry clothes.

May I take this opportunity to remind parents to send in a pair of named wellington boots that we can keep at school.

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.

Nicola Palmer

The class are settling in really well with everyone arriving at school happy and ready to start the day. This week we have concentrated on securing our daily routine including our handwashing, prayers, register, group circle time, singing, stories and lots of learning through play. Not forgetting snack and lunch time!

We particularly concentrated on making friends and learning everyone’s names during our group time.

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Maths Challenge

Below is a maths challenge for the weekend. This will give the children an opportunity to bring something in from home:

• Find a small plastic container (a container small enough to fit inside your child’s book bag).
• Talk to your child about the sorts of things which will fit in the container.
• Make a collection of tiny things together and see how many will fit inside the container – 1, 2, 3 or more?
• Talk about things that are the same about the objects – for example, they are all small.
• Talk about the things that are different – the colour, what they are used for, are they soft or hard?
• Bring the container and some of the items that fit inside it to school so we can all share and talk about them.

Make sure your child’s name is on the container.

I shall look forward to some interesting conversations next week! Enjoy your weekend.

Nicola Palmer

Hello Reception parents and children,

I hope you are all well and looking forward to your child’s first day at school.

I have posted two new videos on the Memo section of Tapestry. A hello from Mrs O’Connor and Mrs Reid and also a video tour of the classroom and outside area. I hope both these videos will help your child prepare for their first day.

You may also wish to watch this hand washing video with your child. We will be learning the song at school.

Rub the palms, one two
Rub the knuckles, one, two
Rub the insides of the fingers
And the back of them too
Rub the thumbs one, two
And the nails one, two
Now it’s time to rinse them
Happy clean hands for you

I am conscious that some children may find separating from their parents a little challenging.  If your child is at all anxious, please prepare your child as much as possible with lots of positive encouragement.  Reassure your child that we will have fun playing together and making friends.  When you say good bye to your child, a little tip would be to wave briefly and say “See you soon”.

Best wishes
Mrs Palmer

I am very much looking forward to meeting all my new Reception class children and getting to know their families. I’m also very excited and have been busy at school making sure the classroom is ready.

Many thanks to those parents who activated their child’s Tapestry on-line learning journey and completed the ‘All about Me’ section . I enjoyed reading about all the fun activities the children enjoy at home and also finding out what is important to you and your child. If you haven’t already activated your account, it would be great if you could find the time to do this in the near future. I often send information and messages to parents through Tapestry. Please do not hesitate to email the School Office if you are encountering any difficulties. Emails are checked periodically and queries can be forwarded to me. I am also happy to re-send a Tapestry activation email if you wish.

School Office email: admin@stadrians.herts.sch.uk

I’ve created a short video for you all to help you get to know me a little better.

I hope you enjoy the video and the story of the The Colour Monster. I will be in touch again with more videos next week.

Wishing you all a fantastic weekend.

Nicola Palmer

Dear parents and Reception children,

On behalf of Mrs Sallis, Mrs O’Connor, Mrs Reid, Mrs Heffernan, Mrs Ruffell and myself, I would like to say a big thank you for the kind and generous gifts. We were overwhelmed by your generosity.

This week both Reception groups continued to protect their ‘bubbles’ but also enjoyed celebrating together.

On Tuesday, we watched the Year 6 End of Year Leavers’ Mass together.

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Today, we held a joint ‘Sports Day’. The children competed against each other in relay teams. Races included running through hoops, pass the bean bag and a sack race. The children also enjoyed a well deserved lolly and enthusiastically participated several fun dance games.

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May I take this opportunity to thank you all for your support throughout the year. It has been an honour and pleasure teaching your children. They have been a credit to you all and adapted so well to the recent changing circumstances.

Wishing all the children a continued happy and successful school life at St. Adrian’s.

Mrs Palmer

Hello everyone,

It’s hard to believe that we have just completed our last full week in Reception already! 

Letters and Sounds

This week in Letters and Sounds we have been consolidating spelling of tricky words and high frequency words.  We also revisited the following sounds:

oi, ear, air, ure, er   

Words you may wish to try at home:

 oi – oil, coin, join, boil, soil, foil, soil
ear – hear, year, fear, beard, spear, near
air – air, fair, hair, pair, lair, stairs, chair
ure – sure, pure, cure, manure, mature
er – fern, flower, dinner, summer, hammer, boxer, herb, winter

To help the children remember those trigraphs (3 letters/1 sound) we watched the antics of Geraldine the Giraffe (Mr Thorne Does Phonics).   Just Google ‘Geraldine the Giraffe’ followed by the sound you wish to find.  Below are the videos we watched in class this week.

Meet the Teacher

The children made an ‘All About Me’ wheel on a paper plate to share with Miss Perry, our Year 1 Class Teacher.  Each member of the class had the opportunity to chat with Miss Perry and tell her all about their family, favourite hobby, animal etc.

Miss Perry set the children a challenge for over the summer holidays. She asked them to create a portrait of themselves to bring into school on their first day into Year 1. This can be a painting, drawing or collage creation. The portrait will form the basis of their first topic ‘All About Me’.

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The children have also been writing a book about themselves in Reception. The aim being to develop confident, independent sentence writing.  They wrote about likes/dislikes and described their features such as hair and eye colour.  We are aiming to finish the books next week to take home.  They are very proud of their books and looking forward to showing off their writing skills.

Maths

This week the children have been writing numerals 0 – 20 in sequence.  They used a number line to self-assess their numerals, looking out for reversals of numbers (eg. 3, 7, 9) and making corrections as necessary.

Religious Education

We have been talking about God’s wonderful world and thinking about we can take care of God’s world.  We read the creation story from the Bible and discussed the basic concept of ‘fair trade’ and sharing the world’s resources such as food and water.   We shared a plate of biscuits and the children immediately exclaimed “That’s not fair!” when Mrs Palmer had the most biscuits on her plate.

Below is a video you may wish to watch at home – God’s Creation according to Genesis.

Wishing you all a super weekend.

Nicola Palmer

Hello everyone,

Once again, an enjoyable week in Reception 2.

Maths

Double the Number

This week we have been looking at doubling.  We used multi-link cubes, Numicon and our fingers to visualise numbers doubled.  We also played a ‘Double the Number’ game.  Below is variation of the game which you can try at home.

You will need:

• Dice.
• Counters – two different colours eg. 10 red and 10 yellow. If you do not have counters at home, use two different coloured pens.  The idea is that each player will be marking off their numbers with the same colour counter or pen.
• Draw a simple number grid – an example is shown below.

What to do:

• Each player chooses one colour counter/pen.
• Take it in turns to roll a dice – double the number – put your counter on the number.
• If the number has already been covered you miss a go.
• The winner is the player with the most counters (or marked off numbers with a pen) on the board.

Variation

Create two grids with different numbers on each grid.  Each player has a different grid.  Play a ‘bingo’ version of the game.

Further challenge

• What numbers do we have left? 
• What number do you need to roll on the dice to mark off that number?

Support

If your child needs a little support, use objects to show your child what the numbers look like when doubled.

Board games

Board games, such as Snakes and Ladders, support your child’s mathematical understanding enormously.  Once your child is confidently playing a board game, introduce two dice to develop doubling numbers.

Letters and Sounds

This week we have been revisiting the following digraphs (two letters/one sound).

ar – car, bark, hard, shark, park, market
or – for, fork, sort, born, cork, cornet, storm
ur – fur, burn, hurt, surf, turn, burp
ow – cow, now, down, how, town

We have also been writing sentences to include tricky words and some of the sounds revisited so far.

The teeth of sharks are sharp.
Come and see the storm.
The cat has a fur coat.
I like to go to the town.

To encourage independent writing we made books together.  We used card, hole punch and split pins to create the outside cover.  The children provided me with their ideas, I made the front cover and they began writing their own simple stories.  A challenging time for Mrs Palmer drawing and creating alien, horse, dog, castle and rocket front covers.

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Science

Invisible Ink

The children are still really interested in science experiments.  This week, our story time inspired a discussion regarding the concept of visible and invisible.  We decided to make invisible ink.  Here is a short video of the experiment we tried at school:

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Physical Development

Obstacle Course

The children collaborated together to create an obstacle course.  Throughout the process, I observed excellent team work with the children listening to ideas and agreeing how the course can be used.  In particular, I was impressed by the discussions and adaptations to ensure the course was safe and not wobbly.

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Expressive Arts and Design

Stick puppet story art

It is always wonderful to see the children motivate and teach each other.  One member of the class created a story show.  The process involved drawing a background scene, sticking a strip of paper across the scene and creating cut out characters on lolly sticks.  The characters moved along the strip of paper acting out a story within the scene.  The children were excited to learn a new skill from their friend.

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Mrs Palmer

Another busy week at school with the children eagerly embracing all opportunities to learn.

Maths

We read the story of Zog by Julia Donaldson and explored mathematical ideas based on the dragon flying lesson.   For example:  The dragons are practising their flying.  First there were 7 dragons, 2 flew away, how many left?  This progressed to the children making up their own subtraction problems.

During our busy finger sessions, the children also began looking at number bonds to 10.  They used tweezers to pick up pompoms and placed them into the holes of Numicon pieces.   We are planning to continue to investigate number bonds next week.  At home, parents can challenge their child to separate objects into pairs of numbers that, when added together, give the number 10.  Perhaps use 10 favourite toys or 10 pieces of fruit. 

We also played the ‘Compare the Number’ game suggested in my blog on Monday.  I was impressed at how well the children listened to each other’s ideas.

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Letters and Sounds

This week we revisited the following sounds: 

ee – see, feet, meet, deep, week
igh – tight, light, fight, might, high, right, tonight
oa – coat, goat, soap, road, boatman
oo (short) – look, good, foot, cook
oo (long) – zoom, moon, food

All these sounds can be found in children’s Letters and Sounds books.  Watch the following short video to hear how each sound is pronounced.

Now that the children are familiar with the sound of each letter, we are also learning the letter names.  One way of explaining this to children is that a dog makes the sound ‘woof’ but its name is ‘dog’.   We played ‘Alphabet Bingo’ in our Letters and Sounds lesson and the children enjoyed playing the game independently during learning through play.

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We are scientists!

As you are probably aware, Reception 2 are particularly fascinated by colour mixing and enjoy experimenting with different materials in the water tray.  It was lovely to hear the children declaring that they were ‘scientists’ and we decided to create our own science experiment. 

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The children were very keen for me to share this experiment with you at home.  I have a feeling they would like to try it again!

You will need:

Milk (whole or 2%)
Dinner plate
Food colouring (red, yellow, green, blue)
Washing up liquid
Cotton buds

What to do:

Pour enough milk in the dinner plate to completely cover the bottom to the depth of about 1/4″. Allow the milk to settle.

Add one drop of each of the four colours of food colouring — red, yellow, blue, and green — to the milk. Keep the drops close together in the centre of the plate of milk.

Use a clean cotton bud for the next part of the experiment. Encourage your child to predict what will happen when you touch the tip of the cotton swab to the centre of the milk. It’s important not to stir the mix. Just touch it with the tip of the cotton swab.

Now place a drop of liquid dish soap on the other end of the cotton bud. Place the soapy end of the cotton bud back in the middle of the milk and hold it there for 10 to 15 seconds. Look at that burst of colour!  It’s like fireworks night!

Add another drop of soap to the tip of the cotton swab and try it again. Experiment with placing the cotton bud at different places in the milk. Notice that the colours in the milk continue to move even when the cotton bud is removed.

Story Telling

The children have been adapting the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff this week.  Each day we retold the story with different characters.  Ideas suggested were unicorns, dinosaurs, knights, kings and princesses. 

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My favourite suggestion was The Three Trolls who stamped and stomped across the bridge instead of trip, trap.  Guess who popped up from under the bridge shouting ‘Who goes stamp, stomping over my bridge’?  Yes, it was The Big Billy Goat Gruff!

Handwashing Station

Finally, I thought I would share this picture of a super ‘handwashing station’ created by the children using the building blocks.  We did, of course, ensure that the children understood we must use clean, fresh water when washing our hands for real.  However, I thought it was a lovely example of how the children have embraced the way the world has changed in recent months.

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Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.

Mrs Palmer

Good morning,

Below are some ideas that we will be exploring in school this week and you can try at home.

Maths

This game is played in pairs with each player deciding who has the more and who has fewer in their hand.  Children particularly enjoy the fact that holding more doesn’t necessarily mean you will be the winner – this depends on the card that is turned over.

You will need:

• A small bag.
• A collection of small pebbles or a similar object eg. pasta, buttons.
• Some counters.
• Ten small cards shuffled and placed face down in a pile: five cards should say ‘more’; and the other five cards ‘fewer’.

What to do:

• Play in pairs.
• Each player takes a handful of pebbles and counts how many they have.
• Each player compares their count total with their partner’s count total and decides who has more and who has fewer.
• Turn over the top card on the more/fewer pile and whoever has the appropriate amount indicated on the card wins a counter.
• Return pebbles to the bag, shake it and take another handful.
• Keep playing until each player has won three counters.

To extend your child – ask how many more or how many less.

Zog

The following website provides lots of maths home learning activities based around story books.  It is possible to look back through the different weeks to find a favourite story. This week’s story is Zog written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It is a story of a keen young dragon in his first years at Dragon School – I’m sure you all know the story already!

https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/early-years/

There is a different activity for each day and you don’t need the book to access the activities.  You may also like to watch this family film based on the story with your child.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bwdw8y/zog

Letters and Sounds

See Mrs Sallis’s blog this week, look for the digraphs (two letters/one sound) we have been revisiting at school in books you read at home.  To remind you, look for qu, ch, sh, th, ai, ee, igh.

Also as per my blog – try asking your child to read the yes/no questions.  Perhaps challenge your child to write down one of the questions.

Here is another game you could try.

Cross the River

You will need:

• Piece of fabric or paper to represent a river.
• Sounds written on pieces of paper or flash cards if you have these at home.

You can choose your own words to focus on or the sounds we have been revisiting in class.

For example:

ng: ring, king, sing, wing.  Sounds you will need: r, i, ng, s, w

ai: wait, rain, aim, main.  Sounds you will need: w, ai, t, r, n, m

ee: see, feel, seem, keep.  Sounds you will need: s, ee, f, l, k, p

igh: high, light, might, night.  Sounds you will need: h, igh, l, t, m, t, n

(Note:  Make sure you write the digraphs on one piece of paper eg. ng, ai, ee, igh.  They are individual sounds represented by two letters).

What to do:

• Lay a piece of blue fabric on the floor like a river.  If you are playing the game outside then you can use chalk instead.
• Tell your child that they have to cross the river, but a crocodile lives in it.
• Assume the role of the crocodile and stand in the river.
• The only way your child can cross the river safely is to make a bridge.
• Ask your child to make a bridge by laying letter cards across the fabric to form a word.
• Say a word for your child to form.
• Your child chooses the correct sounds to spell the word across the piece of fabric.

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If your child needs support

Use simple CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words eg: map, peg, pig, dog, cat, cup, tin, map, pet

Ask your child to orally sound out the word and take a step across the river whilst saying each sound.

Religious Education

Refer to our blog regarding our current RE topic: Reconciliation – Friends.    Listen to our focus story The Selfish Crocodile.

Talk to your child about the story and explore the following ideas:

• Friends look after and do things for one another.
• Friends make one another happy, comfortable and glad.
• What can spoil friendships?
• How can we make friends again?
• What makes a good friend?
• How can we celebrate friendships? 

Say a prayer for a friend together.  At school we thank God for looking after our friends and keeping us safe.  We also ask God to help us to be a good friend.

Expressive Arts and Design

Art in Nature

You could start by looking at the work of Andy Goldsworthy.

Andy Goldsworthy is a British artist who uses things in nature like leaves, fallen branches, ice etc, to create enchanting sculptures.

If you have a wooded area near you, or a local park, go there and create something in this place. The sculptures should reflect the nature around it, so don’t take them home! And then perhaps someone will stumble across your creation!  You could always take a photo before you go home.

Encourage your child to think about patterns and colour and how the different materials can be used for different effects.

Wishing you all a wonderful week.

Mrs Palmer