Living and Learning: I know that rights come with responsibilities

Year 4 have thought about their rights and their responsibilities.

A right is a choice to make your own opinion and entitlement to things such as education, religion and freedom of speech. Responsibilities are duties or something an individual should do such as following the law and rules.

During our lesson, we thought about the difference between a right and a responsibility.

I have the right to play. I have the responsibility to play alongside others safely and respectfully. Ralph

I have the right to be fed and the responsibility to eat a healthy diet. Umar

In lots of situations, we’ve the right to express our views, but we must do so in a respectful way.

Discuss the importance of these at home with your child.

This week’s message (Friday 30 September 2022)

Our message this week is an important one because it’s all about reading. The message comes from Mrs Latham (our Phonics and Early Reading Leader) and Mr Catherall (our acting Reading Leader, covering a maternity).

Early Reading and Phonics

We’ve started the year as we mean to go on – reading! Our Reception children have started Phonics lessons already – they’re rapidly acquiring the skills to become readers. We use the government validated systematic synthetic phonics scheme Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised.

Children in Year 1 and Year 2 have also got back into Phonics lessons quickly. The lessons happen every day and last half an hour (Reception children build up to this over time). In these lessons, children are taught how a letter or letters (graphemes) match to sounds (phonemes).

We also have reading practice groups for children to use and apply their phonics skills. These are small group sessions, led by an adult, where children read a book that’s matched to the phonics phase for the children in that group. The time to do this has been made available by moving to allocating e-books for children. The e-books are essential for children to share their phonics reading success at home. Please make sure you hear your child read the e-book every week.

Year 1 or 2 children who have secure phonic knowledge will begin to access a wider variety of books in school and to take home.

Children will also take a sharing book home to develop a love of reading. These books are to enjoy together and read for pleasure. Enjoy stories, predict what might happen and use different voices for the characters. Information books (non-fiction) can also be so much fun to share – finding out facts and discussing new information. Above all – make it fun!

Our recent reading workshop explains phonics and early reading in more detail.

Key Stage 2

‘Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s success.’ (OECD 2002)

Should my child be reading at home?

In Sphere Federation schools, we insist that children read at home. Failure to do so would mean that children are missing out on the numerous benefits of reading. Research tells us that children with reading difficulties are more likely to experience mental health problems later in life. To give our children the best chance of becoming readers at home, we ensure that reading at home is celebrated.

What should my child be reading?

Occasionally, we get feedback that adults at home aren’t sure what book their child is reading and when it should be in school. As children progress from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2, we want them to have more choice and ownership of what they read.  For some families, this can feel less structured than it might have done when children were lower down school. Because of this, we’ve made some changes to how we read in Key Stage 2. Starting after the October half-term, we’ll be moving to a more structured system for reading at home.

What will this look like?

Our children are provided with the opportunity to read a variety of rich texts in school and at home. Children are always involved in the process of choosing what book they read at home and we place a high emphasis on choice of text. To ensure our children read a suitable range of suitable texts, we rotate between ‘solo reading’ and ‘group reading’ on a half-termly basis:

• Autumn 1: solo reading
• Autumn 2: group reading
• Spring 1: solo reading
• Spring 2: group reading
• Summer 1: solo reading
• Summer 2: group reading

Next half-term, your child will be ‘group reading’. This means, they’ll choose a book that they’ll read alongside some of their class mates. They’ll be set a target page to read to and will discuss what they’ve read with their group and an adult.

What if my child wants to read other books, too?

We love this! We’d really encourage you, if you can, to have lots of books at home. A trip to a book shop can be a wonderful and inspiring shared experience as a family – especially as the days are getting shorter and wetter! If you prefer to shop online, great! We’ve recently signed up with Love Reading 4Kids. This is a great website with a huge range of books at good prices. And, if you buy through this site you can support us here school – we’ll receive 25% of the value to spend on books!

Autumn is coming!

The children have been exploring natural objects found in our garden area. We collected a selection of leaves, bark, and vegetables that had grown over the summer and added them to our Autumn themed tuff tray. All the children share a common interest in our play dough area, this week we really explored our sense of smell and added cinnamon and clove!

Next Thursday we will be going for our ‘Wellie Walk’ around our local area to see what other natural objects we can find. Please ensure your child is wearing suitable footwear, as it may get a little muddy.

You could encourage your child’s learning further at home by going for your own ‘Wellie Walk’ in your local area,  your child can collect objects to bring back to nursery to share in our circle times. This is a fantastic way of developing your child’s understanding of the changing seasons and exploring new vocabulary!

Poetry Basket-

Each week the children will be learning a new poem from our poetry basket session. This week was ‘chop chop’. Ask your child to sing it with you at home!

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Nursery now has its own dedicated email address to send in photos, achievements or any queries regarding your child’s development.

stjamesnursery@spherefederation.org

Happy Walking!

The Nursery Team

30 September 2022

There’s a social theme to this week’s Talk Time as we think about our speaking and listening skills.

Agree or disagree: speaking is more important than listening!

Spend a few minutes having a conversation about your day with a someone at home. After the chat, reflect on how much time you spent speaking and how much time you spent listening. Would the conversation be the same if you didn’t speak/listen as effectively?

Below are some statements about effective listening and speaking which may help you when deciding whether you agree or disagree on the above statement.

Effective listening entails simultaneously observing, understanding, and generating ideas.

Effective speaking means being able to say what you want to say in such a way that it is heard and acted upon.

In school this half-term, we’re focussing on some of the physical skills of speaking. In particular, we’re ensuring children project their voice. When discussing this at home, help by making sure your child speaks confidently, clearly and coherently (no mumbling!).

RE: What is Ramadan?

During this week’s RE lesson, we continued our learning of Islam. We recapped the five pillars of Islam and focussed our learning on one particular pillar: Sawm (fasting).

Check out this short animation about Ramadan – we followed a QR code to view it. Why not watch it again together with your child at home!

Friday 30th September 2022

This week, our spellings focus on double consonants:

appear

different

difficult

possible

trapped

happening

opposite

arrive

hopping

clapped

30.09.22 Spellings

We are learning to use an apostrophe in contracted words. The apostrophe marks the spot where the letter or letters have been removed. Use the following words to create your own sentences. Practise them ready for a test next Friday.

haven’t

couldn’t

don’t

they’ve

we’re

won’t

aren’t

you’re

Week 4

What a fantastic week we have had in Reception. On Monday we started our daily poetry work. We loved listening to the poem and learning actions to go along. Our poem this week was called ‘Chop Chop’ and all the children will bring it home with them on Friday to share with you. Check out the video below to see us in action.

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We had our first visit to the school library this week. It was great fun looking at all of the books and choosing one to take home. Please can all library books be returned on Monday so we can return them and choose another exciting story.

We have been learning more about where we live and our families. We used google maps and street view to look at different places in Wetherby and then shared information about our families and things we like to do together. Thank you to everyone who has brought a family photograph in, the children love sharing them with their friends. If you would like to send a photograph into school we would love to add it to our frame wall. Photographs can also be emailed to our reception email stjamesreception@spherefederation.org.

On Thursday 6 October we will be going on a local Autumn walk. Please can all children come to school in a warm coat and sensible shoes. If you would like to send wellies in to wear that would be great!

PE

In PE, we’ve been using our throwing and catching skills. We’ve also talked about the skills we need to defend a ball that is being thrown. Today, we put all of this together and introduced a game of ‘bench ball’.  We used hoops to help us understand the rule that 5 people need to be on the bench for a point to be scored. Next week, we will be using the benches!

The children had lots of fun and demonstrated some fantastic throwing, catching and defending. Who knew they could jump so high to defend a ball? We also had a great umpire, making sure everyone followed the rules of the game. Well done, Year 2!

What’s in the Box?

This week, Year 5 and 6 are writing our first piece of short, descriptive narrative. This writing is based around our class novel (Secrets of a Sun King) where Lilian, our main character, finds a mysterious package on her grandpa’s front door step.

Our aim is to engage the reader by showing them Lilian’s thoughts and feelings, instead of just telling them everything that’s happening. We can do this by leaving little clues for the reader to pick up on – this allows the reader to paint a better picture of the story in their minds.

I am so impressed with the amount of perseverance all pupils have shown with this writing – some children even started all over again because they were determined to improve!

Here are some examples of our work so far – well done, everyone!