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. You will also have access to a weekly newsletter in your child's home learning folder, so that you can find out what we have been finding out about in class. 

 

Term 4 Learning

In Term 4, we will be focusing on our main topic area of Ticket to Ride! The children will be developing their knowledge of the local area and the wider world, thinking about a selection of manmade and natural features, such as postboxes, churches and woodland areas. We will also be looking at various transport and how we can travel in different ways. They will be developing their use of language when describing a route, linked with simple mapping skills and directional pathways in their spoken language. They will be drawing upon their own experiences of travelling to different places, both within the local area and further afield, such as thinking about when they may have been to various places in the United Kingdom, or to holiday destinations in other countries. Our role play area will be a train station in Term 4, and our core text in English will be “The Train Ride” by June Crebbin. We will be linking our writing skills to our topic and core text over the course of Term 4, and we look forward to sharing our English work later in the term during our Parent Evening meetings. We will continue to help the children to gain confidence with writing clear letter shapes (graphemes) to match a sound (phoneme) in their writing, and also develop their sight recall and spelling knowledge of tricky words, following Little Wandle phonics scheme. This term, we are over-learning the phonemes, as we have now covered all those taught in Year R. The children will be applying their phonic knowledge to read longer words this term. We will also be over-learning the tricky words taught so far, rather than introducing new ones. There is more information on phonics and reading further down this page - no new videos for this term.

 

In maths this term we will continue to develop the children’s subitising and counting skills. Subitising is when the children can see the quantity immediately, without having to count, for example, recognising spots on a flashcard as a quantity. They will embed their counting skills by saying numbers accurately when touch-counting objects and images. This will help to develop their understanding of 1:1 accuracy when counting with greater care, and they will then connect these quantities to numerals. The children will also explore the composition of numbers within and beyond 5, for example, saying, “5 and 2 is a part of me, and the whole of me is 7.” Lastly, we will start to look at identifying when two sets are equal or unequal, and start to connect two equal groups to the knowledge of doubles. We share weekly maths learning either on Tapestry or in our Home Learning folders, so that you get to know the exact process and content of what is being taught in class, and can help to embed the skills at home. We often share Number Blocks episodes in class, so we will let you know which episodes are relevant to our lessons each week, so that you can share these at home to talk about together. We will also be exploring 2D and 3D shapes linked to our Ticket to Ride topic and the theme of transport, along with learning about a range of other measures in our play based learning, such as making comparisons with weight, height, capacity; and also using time and money in our play. Feel free to join in at home - cooking, measuring or using coins and timers! 

 

Some of our Schemes for Term 4:

Jigsaw (Personal, Social, Health and Relationship Education): Healthy Me

Zones of Regulation: "Exploring tools for calming", and "Considering the size of the problem"

Religious Education: Which stories are special and why?

PE: PASS Ball skills and developing games 

 

Phonics and reading

The children take part in reading sessions 3x week in small reading groups with our teaching staff. Over the week, we focus on the skills of decoding, prosody and comprehension, which you can find useful prompts about in the Little Wandle books to help join in with these skills at home. The children will bring home a new book every Tuesday. We look forward to sharing our skills with our family member, but please remember reading is a shared experience for our young children! And please....always take time to share the Reading for Pleasure book with your child - they choose these on a weekly basis every Tuesday, and will enjoy a wide range of enriching texts through sharing these books with yourselves and wider family at home. The children will also visit the school library every other Wednesday, to choose a new book to keep at home to share. Every Wednesday, we ask the children to read for as many minutes as possible after school, which is how we take part in the KM’s Buster Book Club Reading Challenge. Please remember to write the minutes into the bookmark, so that we can count them up for our class on a Thursday morning.

 

Some top tips...

The word phoneme means the smallest unit of sound, for example, cat has 3 phonemes, c - a - t. 

The word grapheme means the letter shape.

The word segment means breaking the word down into the phonemes, for example, by saying "c.....a.....t".

The word blending means being able to put the phonemes together to say a word. 

Some sounds are voiced and some are unvoiced. Watch the videos below to help with your pronunciation of the phonemes:

Phase 3 sounds taught in Reception Spring 3 - YouTube

Phase 2 sounds taught in Reception Autumn 1 - YouTube

Phase 2 sounds taught in Reception Autumn 2 - YouTube

 

The children will bring home weekly Little Wandle phonics sheets so you can fully support them in this area of learning, showing you the words we have learnt in class using our phonics (decodable words), as well as a selection of tricky words which cannot be decoded. Some children will take part in smaller groups to help overlearn the skills learnt.

 

Useful information:

PE will be on Monday for Term 4. Children to come in wearing PE kit please. No earrings to be worn. 

Forest School inspired learning dates will take place on 27^th February, 13^th March and 27th March for Term 4.

Remember the children need a water bottle everyday please. 

Free fresh fruit is provided, but you can send in your own fruit for your child if they prefer. Milk is free for 4 year olds, however, once they turn 5, you do have to pay via the Cool Milk website if you want this to continue for your child.

Please make sure all clothing is named - this is essential in Panda class to help the children with organising their belongings.

Always provide a spare set of clothes and plastic bag in school bags, in case of any accidents during the day.

Please let members of staff know if there is a change of adult picking up either at drop off by the gate, through Tapestry, or by contacting the main office if it is a change that arises during the day, as we may not read this in time on Tapestry. 

Lastly...please remember we are a NUT-FREE school. This includes peanut butter and Nutella type sandwich spreads, along with nuts in any bars at lunch time. Thank you.