w/c 10.10.22
Thank you for discussing the menu choices each morning with your child before drop off - it is really helping us to speed through the dinner register and allowing us to make a quicker start to our learning. Please carry on with this, as it may help the children to try other meals as well as the jacket potatoes! If the children's water bottles run out, we do re-fill them for them and they also have a beaker of water in the dining hall.
The children are still working really enthusiastically in our phonic lessons on all the sounds covered so far and with helping Fred the Frog to blend the sounds into words like bin and bat. They should have brought home phonic homework sheets on each of the sounds and the school office will have sent you out the links. This week the new sounds are b, f, e, l and h - don't forget to use the links at home to practise. In Literacy sessions we will also be practising nursery rhymes and performing them to our friends. We will also be doing some writing based on the story of 'Where the wild things are' by Maurice Sendak.
In Art this week we will be mixing colours to make new colours and exploring the work of Rothko. We are really looking forward to our circle time on how we have changed and grown and can't wait to see all the baby and toddler photographs!
In Maths we will be completing week 4 of the NCETM's Mastering Number programme.
Subject knowledge - This week, the children will build on their subitising skills. They will continue to use ‘perceptual’ subitising – instant recognition – by saying the number of sounds that they can hear, such as claps or drum beats, without needing to count. They will be encouraged to look closely at small quantities and observe whether the quantity has changed or only the arrangement.
When investigating the shapes made by Numberblock Four and making similar arrangements, children may also begin to develop their skills of ‘conceptual’ subitising. They will begin to notice the sub-groups that can be perceived within a larger set, and recognise the whole at the same time. For example, they will see that Numberblock Four can be arranged with 2 blocks on top of another 2 blocks or as a line of 3 with 1 on top, and connect both to 4. This will further develop their understanding of part–whole relations and the composition of number from Week 3.
The children will also be encouraged to represent quantities in different ways by using a number of fingers on one hand. Some children will be able to show an amount ‘all at once’ while others will need a lot more practice to be able to do this. Build confidence by allowing the children to ‘grow their fingers’ – putting up one finger at a time – before showing them, and gradually introduce the idea of making an amount ‘all at once’ when they become more familiar with finger patterns.
Connections - The children have already had experience of perceptual subitising. They have also made a variety of collections of 3 and 4, which will have given them a developing number sense of quantities to 4; this will support them to subitise to 4.
During Reception and beyond, children will continue to perceptually subitise and use these skills to help them explore and deeply understand the composition of numbers within 10. This will support their increasing fluency with number bonds and help them develop efficient and flexible calculation strategies in KS1 and beyond.
They will be continuing work on repeating patterns with 2-D shapes in our Maths session on Friday.
We have some lovely photographs to share with you. Please could everyone return any outstanding 'Photograph Permission' forms, so that we can post the photos on here, minus any children who can't be in them. We are just waiting on a couple now. Many thanks.