Reception

Spring Term

Our Term 4 was very busy! We have been developing our reading skills through phonics and our listening and attention skills in Talk Through stories. We started to look for signs of spring in our outdoor area and had some very eggciting spring visitors!

Reading

We teach phonics at stage not age, so all of our reception children are learning slightly differently. Some are learning to blend which means listening and saying sounds, a bit like a robot C-A-T cat. Some are beginning to read these 3 sound words in print. We call these our green words. The ideal stage for our children to be at in term 4 looking into term 5 is ditty group. This is where we begin to read 4 sound words, simple sentences and our first ‘special friends' (digraphs) which means 2 letters one sound such as sh, th, ch, qu. 

To practice other reading skills like comprehension - our understanding of the story and what is happening we use a scheme called talk through stories. We will focus on the same book all week, reading it, living it, joining in and zooming in on key words or words we dont understand. We collect interesting words to practice using in our everyday environment. We practice them together first by playing a thumbs up/ thumbs down game. For example we might say ‘Suddenly the fox jumped out’ and we would put our thumbs up, contrastingly we might say ‘Suddenly the snail slithered along’ and we would have thumbs down. 

You can practice comprehension skills at home with any book, TV show or film, asking simple questions like who are the main characters? What is the problem in the story? What is the solution? How might that character feel when? 

Writing 

We do practice writing in our Read Write Inc phonics sessions and this focuses on accuracy, letter formation and counting the sounds for our words. This gives us the foundational skills for writing and we use these to write for fun. We use a scheme called drawing club to help us write. We have a cycle of re-telling a traditional tale, a loved storybook and an old animation. We consider these to be an adventure, we go on together exploring more wacky vocabulary, character descriptions and alternate endings, the possibilities are really endless. We keep our writing activities open ended so all children can write what they want to at the cusp of their confidence. We found that whilst topic specific writing can be fun, not all children have the phonics skills to write certain words, so we adapt in the moment with the children following their lead. Their writing just has to be ‘phonetically plausible’ which just means that they have used the sounds they know.  A reception favourite this term has been fraggle rock! 

Maths

This term in maths we have been focusing on number, its composition and how we can make, double/half and recognise quantities. We have been using resources like numicon and cubes to help us. One of our biggest challenges was being given a number and trying to find 2 smaller numbers to combine to make it. We have also been looking at recognising more and less when looking at a quantity and trying to link this to a number line. Our next challenge is counting beyond 20 and recognising number patterns even further
                                                                                                           

Inquiry learning

In inquiry learning we have been exploring animals' homes and habitats. We started by looking at pets and what animals need in our homes and zoomed out and looked at habitats around the world. We have jumped into the Arctic, Savanna and Rainforest. We have learned facts and immersed ourselves in each world as well as getting involved with a lot of arts and crafts.  
                                                               

Visits

Our biggest visit this term was the chicks! We observed them, recorded our findings, and had lots of cuddles! We sung our amazing spring chicken song to all of you. We are preparing hard for our next visit to the rare breeds centre and have learnt a lot about animal homes in preparation! Have a look at our website all about the chicks: https://sites.google.com/napier-tkat.org/chick-news/home?read_current=1