Can you believe we are in the last half term of the school year? We have lots of great things coming up in Summer 2. This half term’s theme is ‘Where in the World?’ We’ll be exploring maps to identify which country and city we live in, thinking about coastal habitats and sealife and preparing to move into year one.
As we prepare the children for their transition, you may hear them talking more about ‘getting ready’ for year one. Thank you to parents and carers who’ve already started to support with this, by encouraging children to come into school and complete their morning jobs independently.
One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab
We’ve been reading One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab by April Sayre and Jeff Sayre.
This book, which is set on a beach, has a maths link. It describes how many legs you can see when combining different animals, insects and humans!
In our writing, we’ve used images from the book and described what we can see.
The book has also inspired lots of talk around seaside locations we have visited before.
Help at home- To continue our discussions around seaside locations, it would be lovely to have some pictures up around the classroom of the children visiting a beach. Please email these over to the usual address below:
Geography- Where do we live?
In our non-fiction reading, we’ve been looking at maps of the United Kingdom. Country is our word of the week. We’ve learnt that there are many countries across the world and that our country is called England.
The children enjoyed looking at a map of the United Kingdom, locating Leeds and having a go at reading other town and city names on the map. We’ve also been creating our own maps by copying images and place names or using our imaginations. We focused on adding a coastline to show which areas are land and which are sea.
Help at home- Next week, we’ll be focusing on our city; Leeds. Please have a chat with your child about their favourite places to visit in the city, as we’ll be asking about this in class.
Maths; counting and arrangement of shapes
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be revisiting mathematical skills learnt across the year. This week, we’ve been counting collections of objects from larger sets.
We made collections of 20 and shared some great maths reasoning when talking about ways to group our objects to make it easier to see there is 20:
“we put one Numicon peg on each finger and did it twice… we did that because we know that 10 add 10 makes 20!”
“put one counter under each finger of one hand…we need 4 groups of 5”
“we made 2 groups of 10”
“we made a tower of 20 with multilink cubes because they are easier to count in a row than when they are spread out”
In provision, we’ve been using Tangram pictures to match position, orientation and arrangement of shapes.
Art; Observational drawing and Artist focus
We’ve been making observational drawings of real-life objects that have washed up on beaches.
We also began a project based on our focus artist; Alexander Calder. We’ve been cutting shapes from card, which will be used over the next few weeks to make mobile sculptures based on Calder’s work.
Phonics
Summer 2 week 1 has focused on phase 4 words with long vowel sounds.
In provision, we’ve been having a go at ‘sentence substitution’; reading a sentence and replacing one word with a different word, making sure the sentence still makes sense.
Poetry Picnic
Each week we will be learning a new poem. We will recite this poem each day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is called Thunderstorm
We talk about how a poem sometimes has rhyming words and sometimes doesn’t. Can your child tell you the rhyming words in this week’s poem? We also talk about how a poem can have a fast rhythm or a slow rhythm.
Click below to watch Reception recite this week’s poem!
Pictures of outdoor learning this week…
Reminders and Dates
Swimming
Rainbow- 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July
Sunshine- 14 June, 28 June, 12 July