Cygnus - Reflect and Review

Dear Reception families

Welcome back! We hope you all had a good half term. This week we welcomed Noreen Azhar from St Frideswides school, an associate teacher and will be with us in Cygnus class until 20th March. She has excellent experience teaching phonics and will be taking Green group for the next 3 weeks as well as supporting the children in their maths and topic learning.  

The topic this term is Long Ago. We will be learning about time and historical events. This week our focus was old toys and how these have changed over the years. 

Maths this week looked at composition of numbers within 10. Before we introduce doubles we reviewed the ‘five and a bit’ structure of 6 to 10 and the concepts of one more and one fewer. 

The children are now all reading books in phonics and will be bringing new books home every few days. Please make sure they always have their reading books in their books bags and bring the bags to school every day. The day we change books will change depending on the timetable.

This week our Drawing Club book was ‘The Paper dolls’ by Julia Donaldson. The children had fun drawing their favourite paper doll before thinking where the dolls might have played if they hadn’t been snipped by the little girls brother. The children came up with lots of ways to keep the dolls safe. Big 3 and Me this week focused on being safe. The children learned the British sign language signs for worried, afraid and safe. The Big 3 and Me challenge this week was to say no if there is something you do not want to do or find a trusted grown up if you feel worried or afraid. 

We had a very exciting Friday as this was our school trip! 

Special thanks to Poppy and Louis’s mums for joining us on the trip to Science Oxford. 

We had a fantastic day. We had a chance to explore the ‘Exploration zone’ full of hands on science, participated in a workshop to develop our scientific thinking and had a wonderful Planetarium show. 

It was great to see so many of you at the parents' evening on Wednesday. Thank you for your continued support with the children's learning journey. 

Next week at a glance

Next week our long ago theme is pirates!

Dates for your diary: 

5th March - World Book Day (See School News on Greenhouse for details

6th March - Outdoor Learning

11th March - Parents Evening 

12th March - HSA Cake Sale

26th March - Easter Service at SS Peter and Paul's Church 10am, Leaving school 9:15am

27th March - End of Term 1pm 

Notices:

Children need a pair of indoor shoes/plimsoles to change into to come into the classroom and a spare set of clothes, including pants and socks, for any accidents.

Please make sure the children have a waterproof coat every day. We have outdoor play as often as possible and we need to be ready for changes in the weather. Please also bring a hat, scarf and gloves for the colder weather.

If your child is going home with someone else, please make sure you email the school office to advise us of the change: office@nhps.org.uk 

Please can all children bring a book bag daily to allow us to send written work and books home when needed? Small rucksacks are too small to accommodate A4 paper and library books.  

Best wishes

The Reception Team