Good Morning Parent Partners,
We hope you are all staying safe and well.
I have created this slide show video for anyone who is still unsure how the phonemes should sound, or anyone who has been unable to find a suitable video.
I have said the sounds twice each time and given the different ways the sounds can be voiced (th, oo)
I hope this helps- please let us know if you would like any other phonics support.
Phonics
Words to read:
| Tricky words- (All current tricky words can be found in your word passports)
Words to Write: melt, fact, golf, jump Phonics Activity: Write the caption (Adult to read aloud); I must not tramp on the flowers. Children may use the phoneme frame on page 9 if needed. |
Tricky words! Ask your child what is a tricky word? “A tricky word is a word you can’t sound out. You just have to know it.”
You can sing the songs for all the tricky words here.
| Literacy Activity
Look through a book. Can you find any words with more than six letters? What is the longest word you can find? |
What book did you use to search for words today? Did your child have a favourite word that they found?
| Maths Activity
3d Shape Detectives! Can you remember the name of these shapes? What do you know about 3d shapes?
Have a look around your home. Can you find anything that is the same as one of these 3d shapes?
|
Did you go on a hunt for shapes today? What did your child find? Please email any photos or comments to:
stjameseyfs@spherefederation.org
It is great when we get direct quotes from children. This helps us gain a holistic view of your child’s learning journey.
If you have any questions we are here to help and will respond to emails in school hours.
For our Sport Relief ‘Game On’ challenge, Foundation challenged themselves to see how many star jumps they could do in 30 seconds.
It was super-tricky to get all of our limbs working together as we jumped out into our star shape and back again. We began the challenge on Thursday during PE and yesterday attempted to beat our personal best! Every child managed more jumps than the previous day with our ‘most improved’ being Lily who jumped 20 extra star jumps! Wow!
Thank you to our parents who generously donated to this important cause.
Home-Link w/c 16 March 2020
This week’s home-link ties in with our sport and health themed challenges of the week and has a hygiene focus. At this moment in time we are being extra vigilant with our hand-washing and hygiene routines but health and hygiene are something we embed every day in Foundation class. An important achievement we look for in the Prime area of Physical Development; Health and Self-Care (40-60m) is:
(Children) “Show some understanding that good practices with regard
to exercise, eating, sleeping and hygiene can contribute to
good health”
We would like you to ask your child; “What are the ways that we can keep healthy?”
Please record your child’s responses (in their own words) and either send this to us via email or written on paper and handed in to a class teacher. Thank you.
Last week, Foundation had a visit from Hand to mouth who spent a circle time with us. We had a feely bag activity, explaining The Holy Trinity. Children picked out objects representing God the King of the Earth, God who sent his son to us and God the Spirit.
The children all listened very carefully but a special mention goes to the star of the session, Chloe, who explained what she knows about our Earth and the ways we speak to God during our collective worships at St James’. She told our visitor:
“God is with us, his spirit is with us”
Later in the week, during our reflection time, we focused on our Christian value of forgiveness. We discussed how it is important to show forgiveness to others and took part in an activity where we drew a picture on a whiteboard about a time where we might have made someone feel a bit sad. We spoke about feeling sorry for these times and we rubbed our boards clean to represent God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of others.
If you would like to see pictures and activities from our reflection times, these can be found in our presentation book, in our classroom reflection area.
Home-link Challenge- w/c 09.03.20
It is Spring time! What signs can you see out and about linked to Spring? Perhaps you can see new flowers beginning to bud, leaves or blossom beginning to grow back on the trees, lighter mornings and evenings or baby animals being born?
We would like you to take photos, draw pictures or write sentences about the first signs or Spring. As always, you can email activities and photographs to the class email address:
stjameseyfs@spherefederation.org
We just LOVE reading in Foundation! We read and explore stories every day and all year around but it is great to have a special day each year to celebrate the joy of books.
For World Book Day 2020, we dressed as our favourite characters and brought in some of our favourite stories to tell our friends about on the special story-tellers chair!
We were also lucky to have some of our parents join us for a stay and read session this morning- thank you to those who could make it.
Some of us have created book marks, drawn pictures of our story characters and played our ‘guess the story’ game too.
Check out our wonderful World Book Day photos:
Here are some quotes from our children about their favourite stories:
Connor (F1) on his non-fiction Rumble with the Dinosaurs book- “This is my favourite book about dinosaurs; T-Rex, anchisaurus, spinosaurus. Look! If you press the button it goes ROAR!”
Willow (F2) on The Gruffalo– “I’m a Gruffalo. The mouse took a stroll in the deep, dark, wood!”
Elijah (F1) on his Henry; Thomas the Tank Engine book– “It’s a Henry book… see you can buy tickets to the museum to see Henry and Thomas and all the engines. There’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 engines”
Chloe (F2) on Snow White and the buried treasure- “In the story they find some treasure and a necklace- The norths, the seven… THE DWARVES! My favourite part was the prince going away… and this part makes me laugh cause the little dwarf goes under the rug!“
Phew… what a busy half term we have had! Thank you to all of the parents that joined us at our Parent’s Evenings this week.
We have welcomed new friends into F1, who have settled into class beautifully.
F2 have completed all of their sounds in Phonics and made their way to focus number 9 in Maths.
The class have enjoyed their gymnastics coached sessions and exploring new equipment and movements in movement play.
We have explored lots of stories, fact finding, role play and more linked to our interest-led topic of The Royal Family and castles.
We have thought lots about our Christian values of love and friendship. We have learnt about mindfulness and keeping safe online.
Generally, we have seen so much progress with all the children in both their learning and confidence and we can’t wait to see it continue for the final half of our school year!
Thank you to all of the parents that joined us at our Parent’s Evenings this week, where we were able to share this fantastic progress with you.
Next half term, the children have expressed an interest in learning about “pirates”, “mermaids” and “unicorns”- we will be developing this Fantasy Land theme throughout the term. There will also be elements of “dinosaurs” to capture another interest. Spring 2 will also see us think about growing in nature with some super exciting feathery friends to look after!
Home-Link Challenge
The home-link challenge is free-style! Pick a Fantasy Land character or topic. You could draw a labelled picture, make a model, find historical facts (pirates) or write a book review for your favourite story linked to Fantasy. We will share the children’s creations during a talk-time session the first week back to school.
Important Dates Coming Up in Foundation
Weds 26th Feb 2020, 6.00-6.45 pm- What is GLD? ;
A discussion about the expectations at the end of Early Years and what practitioners look for to determine a “Good Level of Development” (F2 parents only)
Thurs 5th March 2020, 8.30-9.30 am- World Book Day ;
Stay and Read- We are inviting children to dress up as their favourite book character for the day. Parents are invited to stay and share books with your child and take part in activities for the first hour of the school day. (F1 and F2 parents)
Mon 23rd March 2020, 3.15- 4.15 pm- Writing and Phonics Stay and Play (F2 parents only)
This week in Foundation, the F2 children explored one way in which we use technology with purpose; to find information on our topic. The children came up with their own questions about the royal family and with the support of an adult, used a search engine to find their answers. As one of their writing focuses, they recorded their answers. Be sure to check out your child’s writing progression book, on the parent shelves, to see what they asked.
A big well done to our Star Writer this week, Christian, who asked:
“How often does the queen wear her crown?”
The answer he found also introduced us to a new ‘wow’ topic word: Coronation.
Later in the week, we mixed writing with technology again! After some AMAZING descriptive sentence writing about fairy tale characters, the children used the ‘doodle’ app to draw an illustration that matched their words.
Our technology work leads us into our learning next week, when we will be thinking about online safety.
In maths, we have been using our play ‘shop’ to work on our counting and addition skills. We have also been practising verbalising number sentences and have been introduced to doubling.
We have enjoyed exploring our new ribbons and large elastic in the movement play area to stretch our muscles and make large movements.
Well done to the children who completed their home-link challenge this week and stood at the front of the class to talk about their favourite castle-based story. We loved hearing your ideas in talk time.
Home-Link Challenge
Last week, we had a circle time where we spoke about how it feels inside our bodies when people are kind to us and how it feels when they are not. We then chose five kind things to say about each friend. The ‘friendship hands’ will soon be on display in the classroom.
Foundation is a crucial time for developing communication and socialisation skills. All of the children are learning through their first experiences with friends, how to manage and how to respond to both positive and negative interactions. The Early Years Team focus on personal and social development (as one of the prime areas) in everything we do. We focus on addressing issues positively through lots of emotion exploration and activities that help us to see the good in each other. We know that for parents, it can be distressing to see our children upset or having concerns about their friendships. We are thankful that our parent partners work so well with us to support their children, by letting us know about any concerns they may have. We see beautiful, kind moments from all of the children every day in our class. We are proud to see the steps the children are making towards building emotional resilience and confidence in their relationships.
With this in mind, we would like to join the rest of the school this week by focusing on mindfulness as our home-link challenge.
It is super-tricky to get our youngest children to sit still for thinking and breathing time but we have found a lovely short video with ‘Mindful Ozzy’ that perfectly explains mindfulness and why it helps us:
To watch the video with your child, click here
Please use the video as a way to open a discussion with your child on their feelings about themselves, school and their friends.
Parents Evening Appointments
Next week, our appointment times will become available to sign up for at the school office. To make places available for all of the children, we have appointments:
Until 5pm on Tuesday 11 February.
Two slots only on Wednesday 12 February (3.30pm and 3.40pm)
Between 5pm and 6.40pm on Thursday 13 February.
If possible, we would like for F1 pupil appointments to be made either on the Tuesday or Wednesday so that Miss Feldman can be present at the meetings. For this reason, we would like for F2 parents (if possible) to opt initially for appointments on the Thursday. We appreciate that our recommendation may not be suitable for all parents and you may of course sign up for any available slot you would like. These are allocated on a first come, first served basis.
Thank you.
On Wednesday, Foundation had a special visitor who came to show us some movement equipment. We are lucky enough to now have some of this new equipment in class too, so it was a great chance to experiment and explore. The moves work on core strength which in turn supports our ability to write.
As part of our learning this week on the celebration of Chinese New Year, F2 have spent the last two Thursday PE sessions working on a special Chinese Zodiac dance. The movements were inspired by the animals of the zodiac. Check out our moves!
Here’s a snapshot of another busy week, here in Foundation:
We have also been busy with writing inspired by our story; The Princess and The Wizard by Julia Donaldson. Be sure to take a look at our phonics focused display to see the work by our Star Writer this week. Well done Teddy!
In Monday’s PE, the children enjoyed their first gymnastics session. On Thursday, F2 began to learn a very special dance based on animal movements, which links to next week’s celebration focus.
On Friday we had a lovely reflection time, where we spoke about our special friends and the people in our lives who make us feel loved. You can take a look at our thoughts and feelings in the scrap book located on the reflection cube in the classroom.
Home-link Challenge
Next week in class we will be thinking about the celebration of Chinese New Year. Please introduce your child to the celebration and any facts you can find. We will be watching a video to introduce children to the celebration. You can find the link here if you would like to watch it at home together too.
What a great end to the Autumn term! Have a lovely Christmas Foundation and Year 1/2.
