On Monday, we celebrated our learning by having a Teddy Bear's picnic for our nugget treat. After we had finished our phonics and maths lessons, we used the rest of the morning to do teddy bear related activities with our teddies or favourite toys.  We made cut out shape teddies, we coloured and drew teddies and made teddy patterns.  We sang teddy songs and listened to teddy stories at snack time.  After lunch, we prepared for our picnic by making sandwiches which was great practice for the children's motor skills.  Before eating our picnic, we played some teddy games: pass the teddy, pin the nose on the teddy and teddy bear, teddy bear.  Then we ate the sandwiches we had made along with some teddy crisps before finally searching the classroom on a chocolate treasure hunt!!  By the time the children went home, they were all teddied out!  Now we start collecting nuggets again for our great learning ready for the next treat!

On Wednesday we continued with our phonics, revising the special friends, blending sounds together to create words and spelling words using our Fred fingers. In maths we learnt about 'parts of' numbers and 'parts of animals'. We matched Numicon with numerals, played with dinosaurs, drew teddy bear pictures and played on the decking. After lunch we learnt about the months of the year, discussing when we have birthdays and we sang a new song! We created 'reindeer food' for our Christmas fair and listened to stories at the end of the day.

On Thursday, phonics followed our normal pattern and the children were excited to earn a nugget for their excellent blending skills. What a great set of readers they are becoming! In maths we learnt about parts of numbers again and watched the Number Blocks, parts of a whole, as part of our next steps. We then spent a long time out on the field, making tracks in the wet grass, looking in the hedges, playing football and working in pairs to do a listening hunt. The children worked so well doing this, taking in turns to tick off the sound on the check list and being quiet to listen to the sounds coming from the town. During the afternoon, we had more stories, played games, sang our Christmas songs, made more reindeer food and played. The most popular toy was the magnetic rods, where the children made microphones and created their own bands! We were treated to renditions of the YMCA, We will rock you, Barbie Girl and Wannabe! They show great promise and I hope they remember us when they are famous!

Thank you all for your continued support. 
Gina and Jo

This week we have been learning about the celebration of Diwali. 

On Monday, the children heard the story of Rama and Sita and how this links to the festival of lights that is celebrated by lots of people around the world.  The children helped to create a class Rangoli pattern with coloured sand, rice and lentils and also coloured and cut out their own Rangoli patterns.  In P.E on Monday afternoon, we warmed up with a Bhangra style dance before practising our jumping and landing skills which included jumping and rotating.

On Tuesday, we continued to learn about Diwali and made Diyas which are the lamps that are used in the celebration of lights.  The lights are used traditionally to welcome the Goddess Lakshmi to people's homes and to celebrate light over darkness and good over evil.

On Wednesday we continued with our learning and we painted our own Rangoli patterns, we drew around our hands and then decorated them with mehndi patterns. We watched a short clip about a young girl who celebrated Diwali with her family and spotted similarities and differences with other festivals we know about. We also took part in some Diwali yoga, where each pose was linked to an aspect of Diwali. 

On Thursday we continued with our Diwali theme by reading a story and listening to some Diwali music. We learnt about the 'sitar' and discussed what it sounded like and where it originated from. We made patterns in rice, had a day of construction and made Rama and Sita stick puppets. We also shared photographs of Diwali decorations, buildings, foods and dress and again discussed similarities and differences. All the children seemed to have a great understanding of Diwali!

On Friday, it was our non school uniform day and Children in need. We had a day of Pudsey themed activities including a dance-a-thon that we participated in and also Pudsey face paints. We learnt about why we fundraise money every year for 'Children in Need' and had fun raising money with the rest of the school. We took part in P.E. where we played games and practised our team work. Our favourite game was pop up pirate!

We have been so impressed with the progress children are making in phonics.  Most children now know all the set one sounds and are showing that they can blend these sounds too. We are also now using these skills to spell - wow!  The practice that they are doing at home is so beneficial and we hope you enjoy sharing this with them as well as continuing to share some lovely story time too.

​Have a lovely weekend everybody. 

Our theme for this week has been 'Remembrance,'

This week we explored this theme by listening to stories, learning about why we have Remembrance Day, making poppies, making a whole class wreath for our class trip to the War Memorial, drawing poppies and making our own individual wreaths too.

R.W.I (Read,Write,Inc)
This week the children have been introduced to the set 1 digraphs or special friends as we call them. The children have learned sh, ch, th, ng and nk and have used them in their 'Fred talk'. Sound blending books are now being sent home and we encourage you to read these at least 3 times per week before they are changed. I posted a video link on Class Dojo, about using these at home, so please feel free to watch this to support your reading. Alongside these Sound blending books, we also encourage you to keep on sharing stories together. This is an enjoyable and special time together. 

War Memorial Trip
A huge thank you to those of you who supported us on our walk to the War Memorial in the cemetery behind the school. The children all walked beautifully in pairs and once we arrived in the cemetery showed respect and kindness by being quiet and thoughtful. Once at the memorial the children we able to feel it, look at it, try to read the names and we reminded ourselves why it was there. The children also learned that, it once stood in North Tawton Park and after the Second World War was moved! We used a timer to practise a 1 minute silence and the whole class stood still and quiet. Well done Oak class. 

Assembly
The next day we took part in our school Remembrance assembly, where Reverend Spence led a discussion about 'remembering'. The children listened, asked questions and reflected on things they had learnt. 

Parents Evening
A huge thank you to everyone who made the effort to attend and meet with us. It was lovely to catch up in person and share successes and have the opportunity to talk 1:1 together. These meetings are so valuable and form such an important part of your child's primary school journey. Mrs Ware and I pride ourselves on clear communication and it was really good to meet up. 

Next week
Next week, we see our theme extend towards Diwali. Diwali takes place on Sunday 12th November and we will be learning about it, its stories and traditions!

Welcome back after half term.

On Monday, we welcomed the children back after half term and were so impressed with their independence as they came into class on their own and sat quietly reading a book on the carpet. During the day we practised our oracy skills by sharing news of what we did in the half term holiday. The children enjoyed sitting in the new home corner and dressing up with the hats, scarves, bags  and umbrellas.  In the afternoon our PE lesson was on the theme of space exploration and we worked on our skills of jumping and landing.

On Tuesday we acknowledged the celebration of Halloween and carved the pumpkins which we had previously painted, decorated with buttons and scooped out to make “pumpkin soup”! Rachel helped every child make their own paper lantern to bring home. We read the story So Much which our home corner links to and we pretended to be at a birthday party dancing and dressing up as the characters from the story. We have also been learning about different types of families which also links to this story.

On Wednesday we read the story So Much again and we introduced more role play ideas to our new roleplay area. We linked this with our R.E. lesson, 'What makes each of us unique?' which lead onto birthdays and in particular Jesus' birthday, which for Christians is Christmas. In maths we focused on more/less than and used the words fewer and equal. In our independent learning we made our own pumpkins out of different coloured paper. 

On Friday we learnt about the story of Guy Fawkes and why we celebrate bonfire night. We talked about the tradition and also how to stay safe around fireworks and sparklers. In our independent learning we made fireworks out of different materials, we painted them and used shapes to make them. During the afternoon we visited the book fair and Year 6 came to visit to paired read with us! Photos will follow on dojo. 

In phonics all week we have recapped the set 1 sounds we know. Next week we will start learning the final set 1 sounds which are called digraphs (special friends), sh, th, ch, qu, ng and nk. Remember we have our fire station trip to look forwards to and also our special Remembrance Assembly with the whole school too. 

Good afternoon everyone.

Congratulations to you and your child on making your first half term as a Reception child and parent/carer! Time flies when you're having fun! What a wonderful half term it has been!

Here is a snippet of this week's learning.

​We have spent some time this week thinking about friendship and the ingredients needed for a good 'friendship recipe'.  We put kindness, fun, caring, gentleness, playing, chatting, listening among other things into a big mixing bowl and stirred it all up with a wooden spoon!  Later in the week we thought about how we should include everyone so nobody feels left out and be friendly to everyone.  We played a circle game called I have an empty space on my right and each child asked someone else in the circle to come and sit with them.  This was also a great opportunity for the children to practise their oracy skills by using the full sentences.  We are making friendship sun-catchers which we will hang in our windows - let's just hope the sun makes a reappearance at some point! We also read stories about friendship and explored the idea of being 'selfish'. The children listened well to the story, suggesting ideas about how the characters were being selfish and how the characters were being kind. We also had a little look at going to the dentist, which linked to our story, 'The Selfish Crocodile' and our theme, 'People who help us'. Children shared experiences of going to the dentist, why it's important to brush our teeth twice a day and how the dentist can help us. Look out for more information in book bags, about a little trip we will be going on to the Fire Station, linked to 'people who help us in our community.'

RWI - Phonics
The children are really getting into the swing of our phonics lessons and are starting to be able to focus for longer - our sessions are now up to twenty minutes.  The children are now in progress groups which means they are learning the sounds they need to make progress to the next step in the programme. Part of our leaning now involves, learning the letter sounds, writing it, using magnetic letters to make cvc words and reading cvc words using cards. Some children will begin to bring home 'sound blending books', which you can share at home. 

Maths
In our maths lessons, we are practising subitising (saying the number quickly without counting) images and sounds.  On Wednesday Numberblock four challenged the children to describe different ways to arrange four blocks.  William said "in a square"  Rowan  and Ellie said "in an L shape", Jackson said "a long thin line", Brooke said " tall and thin"  Oscar W said "in a T shape". Some children carried on making 4 in our independent learning some even trying to make the number sentence 2+2 = 4.

In PE on Monday our lesson had the theme of pirates.  Our focus was balancing but we also had fun running North, South, East and West, galloping to our rowing boat, rowing our boat in a seated balance, climbing the rigging, scrubbing the decks and shooing away the seagulls! Our P.E lesson on Friday was full of more games, focusing on our listening skills.  We played an animal game, cars, balloons and we got the parachute out as well.

​Happy half term. 

Hello and welcome to Oak class. Each week you can read what we have been up to and hopefully see some photos too!

Reading/phonics/R.W.I
This week have continued to learn the next letter sounds within Set 1.  These have been c, k, u, and b and we have also practised writing the letter in our books. The children started by associating a picture with a sound (c=caterpillar, k=kangaroo, u=umbrella and b= boot). After this we played games with the sound and then we practised writing it. This week we also introduced ‘word time’. This is when we ‘fred talk, say the word’ and blend cvc words such as sat, mat, bin, pin etc. We also started to use the magnetic letters in our word time to read the word too. We will be doing lots more of this as the weeks progress so please practise those letter sounds at home where you can!

Dingle Dangle Scarecrow Day/Harvest Festival
The children all looked fantastic on Monday dressed as scarecrows, farmers and even tractors.  Thank you for your generous donations of food which FONTS kindly distributed for the community with the help of our Year 6 children.  We have been singing and dancing to the Dingle Dangle Scarecrow song and the whole class confidently performed in front of the whole school in our Harvest Festival Assembly on Monday afternoon.  I hope you managed to see the video posted on our Class Dojo page.  

Maths
We have introduced 2 new members of our class who are helping us in our maths lessons.  They are 2 owls called T-wit and T-wo.  This week we have been counting, ensuring that we correctly use one to one correspondence.  This means we touch each object and say the numeral name aloud realising that the last numeral we say is how many objects there are in the group.  This is a far more complex skill than rote counting. It's important to provide young children with many opportunities to practice counting one-to-one so it's a great thing to be practising at home too.
 
People Who Help us
This week we have spent lots of our wider curriculum time learning about people who help us. So far, we discussed lots of different jobs, the correct words to call them, we matched them with photos of their emergency vehicles, we matched them with how they help us, we made emergency vehicles and created a police car collage. We also watched and learnt about the lifeboats who help us at sea!

PE
In PE on Monday, we continued the harvest theme by playing linked games such as Duck-Duck-Goose, The Farmers in his Den, Farmers footsteps, and Stuck in the field - lots of fun! On Friday we made a circuit and climbed over the bars, hopped across the spots, balanced across the beam, hopped through the hoops and walked along the bench. We then played 'the floor is lava' where we had to find a path across the hall using the spots. Then we practised our hop scotch skills by jumping through the hoops. It was great lesson. 
 
In between other times we have explored the classroom and forest school area and the rest of the school grounds. We have listened to stories and songs.  We have constructed, role played, counted, drawn, made marks, laughed and shared in our week together!
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Thank you for supporting us and your child in the beginning of their school journeys.

Hello and welcome to Oak class. 

Reading/phonics/R.W.I
This week have continued to learn the next  5 letter sounds within Set 1.  These have been i, n, p, g and o and have also practised writing the letters in our books. The children started by associating a picture with a sound (i=insect, n=net, p=pirate, g=girl and o=orange). After this we played games with the sound and then we practised writing it. The children will bring home these next letter sounds to have a go at writing and saying. Please encourage them to have a go at these as and when they feel up to it. Also, please feel free to practise saying the sounds using the flash cards in the reading folders. We hope you feel more confident with this after attending our information evening on Wednesday.

Literacy Tree
As a school we are now introducing a new way of teaching our English lessons. This filters down to EYFS, where we share the same text as the other classes, but our learning is much more suited to our age range. Our next text we have begun to learn about is ‘I am Henry Finch’ and it is an enlightening new story about courage and making a difference. For budding philosophers of all ages, this is the uplifting story of Henry Finch, the loveable little bird who strives for greatness, gets it all a bit wrong, then makes it right again in a very surprising way - truly becoming great. This is an inspirational book and is also very funny. 

Maths
We have started our maths input within the class and this week, the children have been encouraged to quantify sets of objects by subitising, rather than counting. When subitising, children can say how many there are in a small group of objects by ‘just seeing’ and knowing straightaway without needing to count. Subitising can be categorised as ‘perceptual’ or ‘conceptual’. Perceptual subitising is used for very small sets of objects (initially up to about 3) and conceptual subitising is used when sub-groups can be perceived within a larger set and the whole is recognised, e.g. if 6 dots are arranged in a dice pattern, children may recognise this as ‘two 3s’ and know this is 6. Some arrangements are easier to subitise than others, e.g. a set of 3 dots arranged in a triangular pattern may be easier to recognise than a random arrangement, and children need to be exposed to many different arrangements.

Wider Curriculum
In between other times we have explored the classroom and forest school area and the rest of the school grounds. We have listened to stories and songs and taken part in P.E. We have begun to learn about how unique we all are as part of our wider curriculum .  We have constructed, role played, counted, drawn, made marks, laughed and shared in our week together!

Author Visit
We welcomed the author Leisa Stewart Sharpe who read her brilliant story, ‘The Beastly Bunch’, and really engaged us with some interesting facts about flamingos! We came back to the classroom, read the story again and had a circle time about being kind and saying sorry ( a message in the book) and then we learnt about colour mixing and painted our own flamingos!
​
Thank you for supporting us and your child in the beginning of their school journeys.

Hello and welcome to Oak class. Each week you can read what we have been up to and hopefully see some photos too!

Reading/phonics/R.W.I
This week have started to learn the first 5 letter sounds within Set 1.  We have learnt m, a, s, d and t and have also practised writing the letter in our books. The children started by associating a picture with a sound (mountain=m, apple =a, snake= s, dinosaur=d and tower =t). After this we played games with the sound and then we practised writing it. The children will bring home these first letter sounds to have a go at writing and saying. Please encourage them to have a go at these as and when they feel up to it. Also, please feel free to practise saying the sounds using the flash cards in the reading folders. We will be giving guidance at our parents/carers evening on Wednesday about how we say the sounds correctly. If you look in the gallery, you can see some examples of the children's mark making and letter formation. For those children who are new to the tripod pencil grip, we have pencil grips for support and have a nifty little rhyme to help hold a pencil...grip it, flip it, nip it! We can also demonstrate this at the parents information evening on Wednesday. 

Literacy Tree
As a school we are now introducing a new way of teaching our English lessons. This filters down to EYFS, where we share the same text as the other classes, but our learning is much more suited to our age range. To start the term, we have begun to learn about the ‘the Fox and Star’. The story is about fox, who learns to live with star guiding his way, but when star goes missing fox is scared and lonely and must learn to be brave and do things for himself. After a heavy rainstorm, the star reappears and fox realises star has always been there, just hiding behind the clouds. Activities we have taken part in are discussing what stars do (shine, twinkle, glow), discussing our favourite parts of the story whilst checking for understanding and drawing things we wish for on stars and sharing it with our friends during circle time.

This week we have continued our theme 'What makes me unique' by sharing photographs of our families.  The children loved showing their family picks of mums, dads, grandmas and grandpas as well as brothers and sisters and uncle, aunties.  We saw that all our families were different but also shared the same quality - love! Some children then painted pictures of their families.

In REAL PE, (this is the name of the PE scheme - it doesn't mean the other PE lesson isn't real!!) the children pretended to be riding bikes. They balanced on one leg to get on and off the bike, rode up hills and did wheelies and jumped up and down in the rain - it was good fun! In our other P.E. session we played valleys and mountains and then played games with the parachute! This was great fun!

The children are doing incredibly well and we are so proud of them. ​Please support them with their phonics by sharing a book, going over m, a, s, d, t using flashcards and the handwriting sheet and playing games with them. Thank you for supporting us and your child in the beginning of their school journeys.

Hello and welcome to Oak class. Each week you can read what we have been up to!

Settling in
All the children are doing so well in the mornings. Please continue to encourage them to be independent whilst reminding them what they need to do. It’s great to see them all settling by 9am to start our day. We appreciate your help with prompt drop offs in the morning. Thank you.

Reading/phonics/R.W.I
This week have begun our phonics teaching. This has been in the form of learning our signals and sayings, such as ‘My turn, your turn’, ‘magnet eyes’ and ‘team stop’. The children have met ‘Fred the frog’ and played games with him in the classroom. We have introduced the children to the first set of letter sounds they need to know, by looking at the picture on the front (c=caterpillar, t=tower, m=mountain), a list of which will come home next week. Next week, we will begin to focus on the actual sound the letter makes. Phonics is one key way children can learn to read and it is vital we are all saying the sounds the same and we all have an awareness of how phonics is taught in schools. Therefore, we will be having a parent/carer meeting about this very soon. Watch this space.

Literacy Tree
As a school we are now introducing a new way of teaching our English lessons. This filters down to EYFS, where we share the same text as the other classes, but our learning is much more suited to our age range. To start the term, we have begun to learn about the ‘the Fox and Star’. The story is about fox, who learns to live with star guiding his way, but when star goes missing fox is scared and lonely and must learn to be brave and do things for himself. After a heavy rainstorm, the star reappears and fox realises star has always been there, just hiding behind the clouds. Activities we have taken part in are creating missing posters, drawing our best friends, describing and making stars, drawing and learning about foxes and discussing the words, pictures and our likes and dislikes.

This week we have continued learning through our theme all about me - I am unique. The children have learned through their play in the home corner pretending to make dinner for their family, look after babies and weigh, mix and bake ingredients. This was continued through small world play with the dolls house. Next week we will be thinking more about families and would love some family photos to share if you can send any in. We have also explored the classroom and forest school area and the rest of the school grounds. We have listened to stories and songs and taken part in P.E. 
​
Thank you for supporting us and your child in the beginning of their school journeys.

What a fantastic week filled with laughter, celebration and joy. We have had the perfect end to a wonderful year. On Tuesday the children took part in sports day and tried so hard in the sporting activities. Wednesday we were lucky to have a visit from Entertainingly Different who inspired a love of reading through drama, song and music. In the afternoon we joined in with the whole school music concert and the children were fantastic in their performance of Frere Jacques. Thank you to those of you who were able to come to our Celebration of Learning on Thursday afternoon. Learning journeys were enjoyed in our outdoor environment and a special opening ceremony was held for our Ted Hughes Centre for Outdoor Learning. 

Thank you Oak Class for working so hard this year and creating wonderful memories together. Have a great Summer Holiday and best of luck for your transition into Year 1. 

Best wishes, Mrs MacDonald. 

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