Please look out for this letter and your child’s QR code coming home today:

Dear Reception Parents and Carers,

As you know, we collect observations of your child throughout the day as they play and learn in our Reception class here at St. Matthew’s.

These observations help us to build up a profile of their learning and development across the 17 areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile.

We currently use an app called Seesaw to collect and file these observations.  Every half term, we plan to enable parental access to this app so that you can find out more about what your child has been doing at school.

We are sending home a QR code that is unique to your child’s Seesaw profile.  Please follow the included instructions to create a Seesaw account and view your child’s observations online.

Please note:

1. Seesaw access will only be open from Saturday 21^st October until Sunday 29^th October (i.e. during half-term).
2. Seesaw will be open again during parent’s evenings as well as during each half term and over the Christmas and Easter breaks.
3. At the end of the year, you will be invited to download a zip file of your child’s profile.
4. Any photos within your child’s profile that include other children from our class must never be reposted or shared on any social media account – thank you for your understanding!
5. Finally, we welcome your feedback and would encourage you to add comments to your child’s observations on Seesaw (for example, you could add to an observation if you child has followed up on their learning at home perhaps through a conversation with you or something they made or wrote).

Do feel free to ask if you have any further questions.

Kind regards,

Miss Cronin

This week, all the children at St. Matthew’s thought about how they can keep themselves safe when they are online.  We all learnt a new safety code that we will be using to remind themselves about how to keep safe when we go online to play games or look at videos.

First, the children need to remember to ‘zip it’ – in other words, they shouldn’t tell anyone online their name, their age or where they go to school – just like they wouldn’t tell a stranger in the park these things.  Second, the children need to remember to block it; meaning they shouldn’t click on videos, games or pop-ups they are not sure about.  And finally, the children need to remember to flag it; they should go to a trusted adult (‘flag it up’) if they do see something online that makes them feel worried or uncomfortable.

We have also been busy learning 3 new sounds this week.  They are ‘p’, ‘i’ and ‘n’.  Here are the actions and mouth shapes for these sounds.

Weekend challenge: can you remember the six sounds we have learnt so far? Can you remember the actions? How many different words can you make with the six sounds we know? (e.g. sat, pat, pin…)

In our maths lessons, we have been working hard to recognise numerals and show that we understand the quantities that different numerals represent.

Finally, we have been very busy practising for our Harvest celebration which will take place next Friday.  We have been learning a poem about a little brown seed.  If you have time, please do practise the poem with your child as we are trying to learn the words by heart! (Please note, we say ‘sprinkle’ and ‘twinkle’ twice, not three times).

Thank you!

We continued with our topic work this week by taking another peek inside our bodies.  This time, we had a think about something you can’t actually see, even with an X-ray! It’s something that we often say you will find inside your heart – our feelings.

We read a lovely story all about the different feelings we might have and some of the reasons we might be feeling these things.  The children were so eloquent when it came to expressing their thoughts about their own feelings and many of them shared different situations that have made them feel happy, sad, excited, scared and shy.

Later in the week, we also had a think about how we can tell what a person is feeling in their heart and we all agreed that you can usually tell by looking at someone’s face.  We then read the delightful story of Beegu, an alien who arrives on planet Earth in search of friendship.  Throughout the story, Beegu finds herself in some situations that make her feel sad and others that make her feel happy.  The children looked very carefully at the illustrations in the story and realised that whenever Beegu had her ears up, she was feeling happy inside.  Whenever she felt sad, she had her ears down.

One of the prime areas of the Early Years Curriculum is called Managing Feelings and Behaviour and as part of this area, the children are expected to be able to “talk about how they and others show feelings”.

Weekend challenge: Have a look at the photos below.  How do you think the child is feeling inside? Why do you think they might be feeling like this?  Have you ever felt like this?  What happened to make you feel like this?

We also continued with our phonics lessons this week; learning two new sounds ‘a‘ and ‘t‘.  When saying ‘a’, remember to open your mouth wide, as if eating an apple (this is also the action that we learnt for ‘a’).  When saying ‘t’, remember it is a very quiet sound – it is not ‘tuh’ so be careful you don’t drop your jaw too far when saying this one!

As we had already learnt the sound ‘s’ last week, we now knew three sounds ‘s’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ and we were ready to start making words!  We had a go at making the words ‘at’ and ‘sat’.  The first thing we needed to do was pull these words apart to listen for the individual sounds – so Miss Cronin sound-walked the words while the children counted the sounds on their fingers.  We then chose the correct graphemes (letters – in printed form) in the correct order starting with the first sound, then the middle sound and finally the last sound.  The last step was to squeeze the sounds back together again to make the word we needed!  Well done Reception!

In our maths lessons, we spent lots of time thinking about the names and properties of 2D shapes, including a heart!  We talked about the number of sides and corners that a circle, a triangle, a square and a rectangle have.  We also talked about shapes that have curvy sides and shapes that have straight sides.

Weekend challenge: Can you think of a shape that has 1 curvy side and 1 flat side? Can you find some different 2D shapes in your house?

Finally, we have been continuing to enjoy singing our number songs together.  Here’s another one for you to try singing to together at home (please note, we have been singing ‘knock on the door’ instead of ‘open the door’ – but this version is the closest I could find to the one we use – enjoy!):

Our Harvest Festival will take place at St.Matthew’s Church in Durham Road on Friday 20th October at 2pm.  

You are most welcome to come to the service.

Please note that the children should be collected from the Church that day rather than from school.  If your child normally goes to after school club on a Friday we will walk them back to school.

Our class has been asked to collect bags of pasta to support the work of Wimbledon Guild as part of the Harvest Festival.  If you would like to contribute, please hand your donation to anyone of us at the classroom door from today onwards.

Many thanks!