Panda (Year R)

                                                                       

Welcome to Panda Class! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to Panda class

Panda Class is always full of practical learning, which mostly takes part in our play based activities. Our adults will be extending our thinking skills whilst we are playing, by asking questions and using a wide range of appropriate vocabulary in what we do. The children have access to both indoor and outdoor learning environments, to suit all learning styles. We hope you find our Tapestry pages useful, so that you can see the range of learning that is going on in Early Years. Always make time to talk to the children about their day - hopefully the photos on Tapestry will prompt them! You can share any photos with us via this learning platform, too. 

 

For Term 5, our core text is Errol's Garden by Gillian Hibbs - we will be thinking about all things garden and growing based in our wider topic area. Our role-play area has now transformed into a Garden Centre, and we will be having fun finding out about different plants and mini-beasts during this theme of learning, making lots of links with our Early Years areas of learning.  We also have caterpillars in class at the moment, and we will be finding out about their life cycle. In our weekly Jigsaw session we will be thinking about Relationships, and in our weekly RE learning we will be focusing on Special Places in Term 5. 

Phonics and reading

We take part in reading sessions 3x week in small reading groups. We focus on decoding, prosody and comprehension. We then take that reading book home to read. We are enjoying sharing our skills with our family. Remember to use the prompts in the Little Wandle books to join in with these skills at home. And please....always take time to share the Reading for Pleasure book with your child - they choose these on a weekly basis, and will enjoy a wide range of enriching texts through sharing these books with yourselves and wider family at home. 

 

We have now learnt all of the sounds in our phonics lessons - well done, Panda Class! Remember to play with the games at home to help you embed them. We are mastering our recall of the grapheme (letter shape) to say the phoneme correctly. We have gained confidence with segmenting and blending, and have recently been learning how to chunk multi-syllable words, such as fan-tas-tic. Remember to refer to our weekly home learning folders to see how you can help embed our phonics skills and tricky word knowledge at home.  We often use sound mats to help us think about the letter formation in our writing skills. 

 

 

 

Maths

In maths we are building on our knowledge of composition of numbers and extending to numbers up to 20. We have introduced the language of tens and ones, and the children should be able to use stem sentence such as, "1 ten and 4 ones is fourteen altogether." We really do embed our stem sentences in class, so hopefully they can come home and use the same language with you. Other areas of math coming up in the summer terms will be exploring number sequences and identifying missing numbers, recapping some double and half facts, thinking about how many are left when we take an amount away from a number up to 10, and working on our spatial reasoning and problem solving skills. Remember to look in our home learning folders for fun ways to join in with maths at home! 

Useful information:

PE on Friday for Term 5, back to Monday in Term 6 - children to come in wearing PE kit please. 

Forest School inspired learning dates are being shared via our Class Newsletter. 

Remember the children need a water bottle everyday please. 

Make sure all clothing is named - this is essential in Panda class as jumpers all look the same! 

We are getting to the hat and sun protection months - please ensure caps are named and children wear a long lasting sun screen applied at home before school. If they need to re-apply, please ensure these are named and easy for the children to do so, such as spray bottles or sponge applicators. 

Please let members of staff know if there is a change of adult picking up via Tapestry, or the main office if it is during the day, as we may not read this in time.