Elephants

Welcome to Elephant Class

Elephant class is taught by Miss Bamsey and supported by Mrs Austen. We are a mixed age class of Reception and Year 1 pupils.

Spring Planning

Science KIRFS

(Key Information Recall Facts)

Will the children be able to recall the answer for these questions by the end of term?

1. What everyday materials can you see around the room?

2. What are the properties of glass?

3. What are the properties of metal?

4. What are the properties of plastic?

5. What materials are magnetic?

6. What objects are made from wood, plastic, glass, metal, wood and water?

Year 1

This half term the year 1s will be focusing on the phase 5 sounds. We will be following the letters and sounds framework and developing their grapheme to phoneme correspondence. We will start to decode words with accuracy enabling us to become fluent readers. 

Reception 

In reception we will be focusing on our phase 3 sounds. We will be able to identify digraphs and trigraphs in words and start to segment and blend the sounds accurately to read the word. We will look at the meanings of words and begin to identify nonsense and real words. 

What can I do to support my child at home?

• Daily Reading

• Play phonics games 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/alphablocks

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/freeIndex.htm

• Use phonics mat to practise sounds and tricky words. (Use this Ruth Miskin video to help with correct phoneme pronounciation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6OiU2h3sUI

• Encourage daily spelling challenge.

Handwriting

How do we become great at handwriting?

We develop our fine motor skills.

• Funky fingers activities 
• Dough disco
• Write Dance 
• Outdoor chalking and mark making
• Construction
• lego therapy

These activities strengthen our fine motor skills enabling us to hold a pencil.

We practise holding a pencil using nip, flip and grip.

We enjoy being given lots of opportunities to write; using a variety of mediums and context indoors and outside the classroom.

We practise holding our pencil correctly.

This is called a dynamic tripod grip.

We are taught how to correctly form letters

This year, as a whole school team, we have introduced the 'write well' handwriting scheme. The scheme aims to develop a child's ability to follow the correct sequence of movement to form letters.The lowercase letters are introduced in five motion-inspired ‘letter families’. 

To develop your child's handwriting we would love you to partner with us and encourage them to practise forming their letters at home; using the correct pencil grip and sequence of movement. The document below outlines the correct letter formation.

Forest School

Homework

At the beginning of each half term, all children will be given a homework grid. It is expected that everyone will complete at least ONE activity from the grid. Written work should be presented neatly in homework books, using pencils for writing. Creative work can be presented in any way of your choosing, but we would still like a record of it in your book (either by way of a photograph or drawing). Homework will be discussed periodically, but it will not be necessary to bring in the work until the date on the sheet. 

We will also send spellings home weekly; these will either be a collection of tricky words or words which follow a pattern (usually related to spellings of a sound learnt in phonics). Spellings will usually be tested on Wednesday morning. It is expected that children will get three spellings correct; if not, they will be asked to learn them again and be retested at a later date.

Times Tables

Alongside our daily maths sessions, Year 1 children will be beginning to learn their times tables. This half term we will start by learning to count in 2s 5s and 10s. This will develop throughout the year to learning the 2x, 5x and 10x tables.

We will also be issuing the children with their mathletics logins for them to practise at home. 

EYFS

Early Years Foundation Stage

The Early Years foundation Stage comprises of three prime areas of development; personal, social and emotional development, communication and language and physical development and four specific areas; english, maths, understanding the world and expressive arts and design. 

Below is a link to 'What to expect, when?' it is a document designed to help you as a parent/carer find out more about how your child is learning and developing during their first five years, in relation to the EYFS curriculum. 

Autumn Planning

Topic

'What make me unique?'

This half term our topic is 'What makes me unique?' In science we will be learning about our bodies and finding out how our five senses help us to experience the world around us. We will also be exploring where we live, who we live with and what we love about our county of Cornwall. 

English

Our new talk for writing story is 'Peace at Last' by Jill Murphy. During, our English sessions we are going to be using; story maps and paths, actions, role-play and hot seating to learn our new text and become familiar with story sequencing. We are then going to innovate the story together and write our new stories using all our fantastic phonics.