Week ending 15th September 2023

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. 
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Thank you for supporting us and your child in the beginning of their school journeys.