Week ending Friday 29th September 2023

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