w/c 2.1.23
HAPPY NEW YEAR from the EYFS Team - we hope you had a lovely, relaxing break and thank you for all your cards, kind words and presents.
We are really looking forward to welcoming the children back on Tuesday and to kick start our Spring Term with our Superheroes topic! We have changed over our role play areas to create a Superhero HQ with plenty of dress up costumes and action figures to play with, which the children will be adding their ideas to over the coming weeks. We have also created a new home corner with new dolls and dress up clothes too.
Please click on the chick icon below to see our Spring Term Overview 2023.
In Literacy this week, we will be putting our phonic skills to good use to sound out and write about our favourite presents from Father Christmas, using sound mats to help us. The children will continue to work in groups for targeted phonics each day. The children move groups on a regular basis to match their phonic ability. Most of the children will not have any new sounds for a while as they will be learning the sound for any gaps they have and working on oral blending and then blending to read words. Please keep practising the sounds that we have already covered and re-watch any of the links that we have sent home. At home you can help by practising using the flashcards, as well as saying the sound for your child to write down. In the last week of term the office sent out an email out links on 'Fred Talk' to support children who are at the orally blending stage.
This week we are having some extra whole class sessions to revise the "special friends" as we call 'digraphs' ( i.e. when 2 letters make 1 new sound together, rather than their individual sounds): sh, th, ch, qu, ng, nk, ff, ll, ss, ck and zz.
In Maths we will be completing week 11 of the NCETM's Mastering Number programme. The focus will be on subitising.
This week, the children will use their perceptual subitising skills (seeing the quantity without counting) in increasingly complex arrangements, moving from dots in a line and arrangements of 2, to a focus on standard dice arrangements. For larger quantities, the children will begin to use skills of conceptual subitising, beginning to quickly see the sub-groups within these larger numbers. A key focus will be on developing skills of visualising; the children will be encouraged to look carefully at arrangements of dots and then to close their eyes and explain what they saw. Using spatial language to describe sub-groups within these arrangements will deepen the children’s understanding of part–whole relations and allow them to further consider composition (the numbers within numbers).
This week, the children will be encouraged to continue representing quantities in different ways, including by showing amounts on 1 hand ‘all at once’. There will also be a new focus on the symbolic representation of number and the children will work on their recognition of numerals to 5, matching numerals to correct quantities in various games.
Towards the end of the week, the children will use a number track (with numbers placed in equal spaces in ascending order) to play dice-based games. Playing games with dice will consolidate the children’s understanding of the stable order of numbers and allow them to link the numbers on a track to the quantities on a die.
The children have already had lots of experience with perceptual subitising and with making collections of small amounts. Their developing sense of the numbers to 5 will support a deep understanding of the composition of these numbers. Playing track games will also support future work on ordinality, in which numbers are viewed consecutively in relation to each other.
Moving forward, the children will continue to use subitising skills to explore and deeply understand the composition of numbers within 10. This will support their increasing fluency with number bonds and help them to develop efficient and flexible calculation strategies in Key Stage 1 and beyond.
In P.E. we will continue work on improving our core strength in our 'Big Moves' sessions and doing some gymnastics in the hall.
The EYFS Team