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!