Spring Term 2024
Welcome to Barn Owls, our Reception class. Our children will have the time and space to explore their own interests and fascinations. Adults will join children as co-players, allowing them to lead the direction of their play, but finding opportunities to sprinkle learning over the top by joining in with thoughtful modelling, suggesting, explaining and questioning.
When the children arrive at 8.45am, they self register on our 5 frames with a photo of themselves and then get straight on with a Funky Finger activity - letter formation, dough disco, practising using scissors, a big draw, threading, using tweezers etc etc. Something different every day!
Once everyone has arrived, we sit in Carpet Kingdom for phonics. Since September 2023 we now use 'FFT Success For All' for our phonics programme and teach the GPCs (Grapheme, Phoneme Correspondence) to the children through this structured programme. Every day we also do a shared read and read a book that is matched to our phonics programme. These books have red words (tricky words) and green words (words that appear in the book) that are read every day and are matched closely with the phonics being taught. At the end of the week the children take home the same book to read at home for a week. The children become confident reading the book and build up their reading fluency. The children can also take home an additional reading book from the Reading Shed outside Year 2 classroom matched to their phonics. Every week, the children also take a magnetic game home to practice spelling words linked to the phonics being taught, too, which are changed weekly.
Maths is taught practically wherever possible and this year we are privileged to be part of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) Mastering Number Programme.
Each week we enjoy 'play projects', after being inspired by Greg Bottrill author of 'Can I Go and Play Now' and 'School and the Magic of Children'. We have great fun with Drawing Club, too, and get to learn some amazing words which we remember with an action and discover stories, animations and traditional tales. We draw the character, the setting and a solution to a problem and get to write captions or sentences to accompany our drawings. We then take them home to share with parents and drawing club can continue!
This term our books and animations will be Mr Wolf’s Pancakes, Jack & the Beanstalk, Tom & Jerry, The Enormous Turnip and The Easter Story.
Our classroom has a Cosy Club, Message Centre, Book Nook, Creation Station, Land of Possibilities, Tinker Table and Carpet Kingdom. We encourage the children to investigate, explore & discover and they enjoy the freedom to move around the classroom and outside in our lovely outdoor area that we share with pre-school. We are very much 'child led' and follow the children's interests as much as possible.
The children visit Adventure Island every Monday and Friday afternoon where we link our maths and science wherever possible to activities when we are there, but also have time to explore and play with the rope swings, shelters, a pond and lots of MUD! We also have a raised bed in our allotment to plant some vegetables and hopefully will see and get to eat the fruits of our labour in the Summer Term!
'Children are capable. Every day they show us a magic door. We just need the faith to step through it.'
Mary Raffell - Class teacher
