Summer Term 1 (2024)

Welcome to the summer term! I hope we all have a great time learning together.

During the spring term we enjoyed learning about The Gingerbread Man, visiting a museum, spotting signs of spring and celebrating Easter. We will continue to experience an exciting range of opportunities and think about our next steps to develop as curious learners. Lets enjoy the spring and summer weather and explore as nature detectives.

We continue our focus on the prime areas of learning (Communication and Language, Physical Development and Personal, Social and Emotional Development) to underpin everything we do. In addition we will plan and experience many activities and opportunities to enhance the specific areas of learning (Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and Design).

Daily phonics sessions will continue to build on our phonic knowledge through our Little Wandle programme. As readers, books will be sent home weekly, after reading the book three times at school. Children will also bring home a library book each week. Our phonics focus this half term will be on learning new tricky words as well as words with two consonants together.

Our Talk for writing text this half term is The Sleepy Bumblebee. We will learn to tell the story using a story map and with actions. Then we will deepen our understanding through practical activities to explore the setting, characters and structure of the story. This is a great story to help us get out and about in our wonderful school grounds. As writers, we will develop our skills in writing new words and in securing our sentence writing skills. In addition we will focus on securing our fine motor control to help us when we write.

As mathematicians, we will develop our understanding of numbers beyond 10, as well as addition and subtraction and number patterns.

Our new topic for this half term will be Creep, Crawl and Wriggle – This project helps us to learn about invertebrates that live in our gardens and local environment. We will find out about bees, caterpillars, butterflies, snails, spiders and minibeast habitats. We will go on bug hunts, look at art by Matisse and make our own models.

As nature detectives we will keep a close eye on how the seasons are changing.

Things to remember:

Please bring a drink of water every day for snack time/lunch

Spring and summer weather can be unpredictable so bring outdoor clothing to cope with this – rain coats for those wet days or sun hats for sunny days.

Read every day and write comments in the reading diary. This should include time for re-visiting your sounds in your phonics book, reading your Little Wandle book and looking at your sharing book.

Remember to check the website for our weekly class blog and homework activities. We love it when you leave us a message too as we read them out in our class.

As well as outdoor physical play, we will take part in a weekly P.E session in the hall (Wednesday). We will be using some larger apparatus such as benches, mats and climbing frames as well as continuing with our relaxing yoga sessions. As the weather improves we will take part in outdoor P.E sessions using balls, bats and other equipment.

We will continue to welcome children through our blue gate from 8.45-8.55 in the morning.

If you have any questions or you would like to send me information about any of your learning at home, please contact me by email.

Mrs Puddick