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Dear Parents,

            Welcome back, I hope you all had a good break over Christmas. During this term, we are working on topics including pets, shops, transport and spring. Our role-play area for the first part of the term (by popular demand) will be a pet shop and the children will be asked to bring in toy animals and large cardboard boxes for cages.

Communication, Literacy and Learning

            Children will continue to learn letters and sounds. Some sounds we are to looking at now are made up of more than one letter, such as ai, or, ee, oo also moving on to sh, ch and th. We will start to introduce three sounds a week now. You can help by asking about the sounds they know and encouraging them to find words that use or begin with each sound. With the more difficult sounds, enjoying rhyming strings such as rain, train, pain, will help children get used to the sounds. You can also make up words such as nain, wain, bain which could use the same sound.

Children will begin to use these sounds in their reading and writing, firstly when looking at starting letters and building up to include other parts of words. Lots of children are already able to ‘sound out’ simple words and some will begin to blend two sounds together e.g. tr, st, and fl. Children will also be looking at rhyming words. We will think about words that rhyme and look at the spelling patterns. You can help by looking or listening for rhyming words in books when reading together or playing word games. The children are starting to remember some words and build a sight vocabulary. This will be developed more through the use of flash cards and lots of word matching games.

Some children will be starting to read books from a different scheme. This is to ensure that they have a range of experiences, some of which may interest them more than others. It is important that children learn to evaluate and express preferences about a wide variety of literature from an early age. It is very important that children read for a short time every day (approximately ten minutes or so) – we can really tell those who do!

Mathematical Development

          This term we will continue with number work but will include counting in twos and tens. We will be covering more work on addition and subtraction and looking at bigger numbers.

We will also begin comparing masses and finding things that are heavier and lighter. During role-play we will begin exploring the use of money. At first this will be using pennies and we will introduce coins up to ten pence. Children can be encouraged by noticing the differences in coins and by paying for small items in shops.

            We will also be thinking about time. The children have done really well when learning the days of the week and thinking about activities we do at different times of the day. We will now begin noticing key times during the day and continue to get used to the vocabulary needed.

Knowledge and Understanding of the World

            Children will be learning about pets and how to care for them. If you have a friendly pet that would like to meet our class please let me know.

Later in the term children will be investigating toys to find out how they work. They will be encouraged to ask questions about why things happen and focusing on pushes and pulls. Malleable materials will be explored and children will experiment with different tools. We will continue to use computers and will learn how to use the digital camera and small movie cameras. The focus will be on using the correct language for equipment and simple operations.

Children will be introduced to cultures and religions through listening to stories and music. They will also be encouraged to think about how their actions affect others around them.

            Children will begin having tennis skills lessons this term. It is important that all children have a water bottle in our class blue drinks box. This is in addition to drinks they may have at lunchtime.

The next formal parent consultation meeting will be later during this term but if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to come and see me. For a longer chat please come and arrange an appointment.

Wishing you a very happy new year,

Yours sincerely,

Mrs Nicola Field

To see the Autumn 2006 newsletter please click here