Welcome to Ash Class (Reception)
In Ash Class you will find:
What is happening in Spring Term?
Welcome back to school after the Christmas holidays! We hope you had a fun filled time with family and friends!
Spring term is an exciting time for Ash Class. During this term we will be celebrating being in Ash class for 100 days with our class assembly and a party!!!
Our Pathways to Write story books this term will be The Naughty Bus and The Pirates are Coming! The children will learn these stories through the Pathways to Write approach where we use drama, actions, story maps and visual prompts to help us. These stories will lead into our other areas of learning and we will explore travel, transport and journeys, the weather and seasons, pirates and other areas from the children’s interests.
For more details please see our project letter.
Here are some of the rhymes we will be learning about our story;
Homework
Reading Books
To begin with, your child will be recieving a sharing book for you to share and read to them. This is an opportunity for them to hear how stories read, engage with book and talk about the characters and events which are happening. Please make sure that you child to your child read at least 3 times a week and complete the reading record with any comments about your child's engagement with the story. We change reading books once a week, however your child's book needs to be in everyday.
Reading Rockets
This term the children will also be receiving a Reading Rocket. These are words that the children have to learn by sight. The children will progress up the rockets once they can confidently read all the words on each rocket. There are Ten rockets to get. Can you get them all?
In school our children are expected to follow our school golden rules:
- I do as I am asked the first time
- I listen well
- I work well with others
- I always do the best I can
Children will be awarded PALS points in school when they follow these rules and their names will be added to our weekly newsletter once they reach 20/30/40!
Daily Phonics
We are taught phonics through the “Read Write Inc” structured programme of teaching. To begin with the children are taught in 15-20 minute sessions each day, through games, actions and use of flashcards and magnetic letters, learning how to say the sound (phoneme) for each letter (grapheme) and groups of letters like sh, ch, igh (digraphs and trigraphs). They learn to hear and say the sounds in words like c-a-t by pulling them apart (segmenting) and putting them back together (blending). They will sometimes bring some phonics homework home where they can practice writing the sound they have been learning. These vital skills help them to read words that are phonetically spelt but some words, that cannot be easily decoded, are learnt as ‘tricky words’ such as ‘come’ and ‘the’. These skills are then applied to learning to spell and to write sentences.
For more informtion visit:
https://www.ruthmiskin.com/parents/
Reading
You will be asked to fill in the yellow Reading Record book each time you hear your child read at home or you share their sharing book. For every 10 occasions your child reads at home, and this is recorded in their reading champion’s book, they will receive a certificate and a special mention in the school newsletter.
Please be honest with your comments, if your child had problems with certain words or found the book very difficult, please say so. Perhaps they have mastered the vocabulary but still cannot tell you what the story is about. Do not be afraid to leave a message to ask us to send home the same book again; this is not a race and moving on too quickly may result in difficulties at a later stage. In the very early stages, it is fine to simply tell your child an unknown word and explain what it means. Do not let your child struggle with trying to sound out words that are not phonetically decodable, for example ‘tricky words’ such as ‘come’ and ‘who’ which cannot be sounded out as c-o-m-e and w-h-o.