Grasshoppers

  • Mrs Tara Thomas

    Teaching Assistant

Welcome to Grasshoppers!

We are so proud of the way your children have settled into school and their new routines so well. They are all building positive relationships with staff and peers and have developed the confidence to share their interests and needs with us throughout the day.

Our new topic for Spring 2 is ‘Spring into life’. In this topic we learn about the importance of the season Spring and all the new life it brings. The children will be provided with lots of opportunities to observe how living things grow and change through planting seeds and watching our very own tadpoles! We will also explore what life is like on a farm and use our trip to Park Hall Farm to deepen our understanding.

Our Forest Fun sessions will continue this half term as we use the time to focus on understand the world. At every opportunity we seek to encourage the children to be creative, collaborative and curious about their learning and we will continue to encourage the children to access our outdoor provision, so please make sure they have a warm coat and a pair of wellies in school every day.

Talk time will continue to be a daily highlight, so please continue to send in photos on Seesaw for the children to share with the whole class. They are a wonderful prompt to develop everyone's communication and language as well as an opportunity for us to develop our relationships with your children further. 

If you have any questions please contact us as we are happy to help. 

Topic: PE this half term: Important Dates:
Spring into life
Tuesday: Outdoors
Rackets, bats, balls and balloons.
 
Please come into school on this day
wearing suitable PE kit according to
the school policy. Please ensure all
clothing is clearly labelled.
 
Forest fun Thursday
Please ensure your child has wellies at school.
Monday 19th February PD Day.
 
Tuesday 20th February Children back to school.
 
Friday 1st March Class photos.
 
Thursday 7th March World book day.
 
Monday 11th March British Science week.
 
Tuesday 12th March Parents evening.
 
Thursday 14th March Parents evening.
 
Friday 15th March Park Hall Trip.
Bug Club Phonics - please see the 'Our Curriculum, Our Way - EYFS' tabs for full details about how to support your children with a range of Bug Club videos and resources.

READING PACKETS
All children now have a reading packet. This consists of a reading book, reading record, phoneme mat and phase 2 phonics words that are not yet decodable. Please read with your child every day. We can not overstate the impact that this will have on your child's progress. We have already held our Early Reading & Writing Workshops for carers. If you missed these or would like a refresher, please don't hesitate to let us know and we will happily plan a time to share how we teach your child to read and the strategies we would like you to use at home to support them.

All reading packs need to be brought to school every day. We will listen to your child read on a 1:1 basis across the week and will change their reading book once they are fluent. Your child will need support to recognise and articulate the phonemes to start. The phoneme mat we have included has an image for each grapheme which will help prompt them. We have uploaded the videos of actions for these onto our class website pages. The inside cover of their reading book has helpful information to share with your child before reading the book. Please encourage them to sound out and blend unfamiliar words when they need to, and then encourage them to re-read each sentence without decoding to build up their fluency. If you feel your child is ready for a new book, please don't hesitate to let us know so we can change them on a regular basis.  

The phase 2 words on a fan are to gradually learn. They won't yet be fully decodable for your child. Encourage them to spot the aspects that they can decode before discussing how we articulate the rest of the word. We would expect your child to be able to read all of these words fluently by the end of the Autumn term.

The phoneme mat is to support your child when they are writing at home. (The images also help in remembering the phoneme/grapheme.) We teach phase 2 in the Autumn term and phase 3 in the Spring term. They are produced in the writing font we teach the children in school and are a useful model for their letter formation when writing lists, notes, cards etc. at home.

We are more than happy to have a chat with you about your child. Please feel free to come and see us whenever you need. If we can’t chat at the time, we will make arrangements so that we can do so as soon as possible. Thank you for your support.

You will have already received a Seesaw code. Please log on to this as soon as possible as we use it as a communication tool with our homes to help share important information.
 
We also use core interactive and exciting programmes to support our learning, which can be logged into at home using the children's provided usernames and passwords. All passwords will be inside your child's reading record.
Below you can download supporting documents which will help with home-learning: