Reception

This half term, we will be taking a stroll through the deep dark wood with a crafty little mouse who is pretending to be on the way to meet a Gruffalo! This fearsome beast has awesome features - terrible tusks and teeth, orange eyes, purple prickles, warts and knobbly knees - and its favourite food is, roasted fox, owl ice cream or scrambled snake….delicious right? On this journey, we will not only learn lots of new vocabulary in Literacy that will be introduced by our class wizard Whizzy, but we will also use our spectacular talk for writing skills which will help us to recite the story.

Children will have fun interactive phonics sessions with Fred the frog and they will also learn ‘wicked words’ to help with sight recognition for those really tricky words! We will continue to build on our fine motor skills through daily ‘Squiggle’ sessions and dough disco.

In Maths, Children will practise counting and number recognition through daily challenges. We will start to look at the part-part whole model to compare and combine quantities and apply new skills through solving simple and practical addition number sentences.

In Topic, children will be categorising animal habitats to establish where they live and why they live there. We will be taking a closer look at a variety of animal footprints to figure out who they belong to. We will even have a go at designing and building our very own animal habitats. We can’t wait to get creative in art when we explore colour, texture and materials. We also have lots of exciting celebrations to explore and we can’t wait to get into character on stage and put on a fabulous Christmas performance!

This half term’s topic is based around the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Children will be beginning to describe the characters and events that take place. They will retell the story to others using key story language and accompanying actions. Children will be developing their pencil grip and control through fun, interactive activities. Daily phonics sessions will support early reading and spelling skills. We will be supporting and encouraging a love of reading through sharing books daily and with regular visits to our library boat. Children will be introduced to new topic vocabulary every day with the help of our “Class Wizard” and supported to orally rehearse sentences. They will be given lots of opportunity through both play and adult directed learning to develop and apply their new skills.

Children will practise counting and number recognition through daily challenges such as helping the magic bean seller to count her beans, and counting coins to pay for flowers in the flower shop role play area. We will begin to recognise patterns and continue them. We will also compare the height of objects…including measuring and comparing the beanstalks that we will grow in school. Children will identify which group of objects has more/less or the same.

Children will learn about the changing seasons and the lifecycle of a bean. They will grow their own beanstalk and discover what their plant needs to stay healthy. They will record the progress with drawings, labels and simple sentences. Furthermore, to enhance this experience for our children, we will venture to Trentham Garden Centre. Children will be supported to use a variety of questions so they can discover even more!

In our PE lessons, children will be working on their spatial awareness skills, agility and movement. Children will move in a variety of ways, changing direction and develop gross motor co-ordination.