A huge thank you to all the parents and carers who came to celebrate our Harvest festival in the Church on Friday. And many thanks for all the donations of pasta which were gratefully received by Wimbledon Guild. We hope everyone is having a lovely half term break!
This coming Friday (21st October) our Harvest Celebration will take place in St. Matthew’s Church.
Parents and carers are all most welcome to join us for the service which will start at 2pm.
Please note that after school pick-up will be straight from the Church at approx. 3pm.
When collecting your child in the Church, please bear with us as we will hand the children over one-by-one to ensure everyone has been collected and we will ask the children not to go to you until we have called their name. Most importantly, please do not leave with your child without making sure we have seen you together.
We will bring water bottles, snack bags/boxes and lunch bags with us to the Church, so please remember to collect these before leaving.
Finally, Reception class are collecting packets of pasta for our Harvest box which is donated to Wimbledon Guild. We will be putting our box together all this week, so please send in your donation if you are able to.
Many thanks for all your support!
Here’s a handout from a website called Twinkl that I think explains quite nicely how phonics (letter sounds) are used when learning to read. Hope you find it helpful!
This week, we pulled three new sounds out of the sound bag. They are ‘p‘, ‘i‘ and ‘n‘.
When practising ‘p’, we pretended our pointy (index) finger was a birthday cake candle that we were blowing out. When you say ‘p’, you’ll notice a short puff of air on your fingertip.
When saying ‘i’, we made sure our lips stretched right back into a grimace and we could see each other’s teeth. It’s very easy to muddle ‘i’ with ‘e’, so we tried to think of the sound at the start of ‘igloo’. Our action for ‘i’ is to wiggle our fingers on the end of our noses, pretending to be Inky the mouse; Inky is a character from the Jolly Phonics stories that we dip in and out of.
When learning ‘n’, we pretending to be airplanes putting our arms out as wings. The ‘n’ sound is a bit like an engine sound, with your tongue tucked up on the roof of your mouth. Be careful not to drop your jaw – it’s not ‘nuh’!
A real highlight of the St. Matthew’s calendar this coming Friday at 6pm.
Our Autumn term topic in Reception is ‘Who am I’?
Please find our topic booklet and song sheet below…
We are always in need of resources for our junk modelling area and would be grateful for any donations of:
Many thanks!
A very warm welcome to the first blog post of the new school year. What an exciting few weeks it has been in the Reception class! The children have been doing a fantastic job of settling into their new classroom, making new friends and getting used to the school routine.
This week, we started our phonics lessons and the children were all very keen to find out which sounds were hiding in the sound bag. We listened carefully to the sounds s, a and t. These are the first three sounds that we learn within phase 2 of the letters and sounds programme that we follow here at St. Matthews. You can find out more about this phonics programme here: http://www.letters-and-sounds.com
We also made these three sounds ourselves, thinking carefully about the shapes we make with our mouths when saying them. We used some actions to help us remember the sounds; making a snake with our hand for s, pretending to eat an apple for a, and turning our heads from side to side as if watching a tennis match for t. You can listen to the sounds and see the different mouth shapes in this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhXUW_v-1s
Finally, we had a go at blending the three sounds together. It was very exciting to discover that when sounds are squashed together they make words! We used our robot arms to sound out s-a-t and then blended them together to make the word sat!
The purpose of our blog is to keep our parents and carers up-to-date with all the exciting learning that takes place in the Reception class at St.Matthews. We also hope to use the blog as a means of teaching the children about the internet and how it can function as a source of communication and information. We hope you find it valuable and always welcome your comments (and/or your child’s comments!) which we will share with the class each week.
Please note, I do not own any of the images included on our blog, apart from the photos of our classroom and children.