Topic- Geography
This week in our topic lessons the Year 1s have been learning about the four countries in the UK. They worked really hard on identifying and colouring the four countries and the borders around each one. They’ve had a really good start to the year with a lot of them showing off their geography skills.
Autumn 1: Week 2
We’ve had a fantastic week getting to know each other and our new routines. I’ve been super impressed with their fantastic listening skills and how good they already are at “3, 2, 1 stop”.
Morning drop off
Our cloakroom is very small and can feel very overwhelming. We want to make sure all our children feel safe and have a happy and healthy start to their school day. Therefore, from Monday, your child will line up in the playdough and come into the classroom independently. This will also allow a prompt start to learning and encourage independence. Please wait with your child in the playground until a member of the Reception team opens the gate.
Phonics
This week, we’ve started our phase 2 phonics sessions. We’ve been trying really hard to form the graphemes (a ‘symbol’ of a phoneme –it’s a letter or group of letters representing a sound and we use the letter names for this) and pronounce the phonemes (The smallest unit of sound you can hear in a word. For example, ‘sat’ has three phonemes: ‘s’, ‘a’ and ‘t’) correctly.
If you’re unsure on how to pronounce the phonemes, there are some really useful videos on the Little Wandle parent page.
Phonics home learning
Today, your child has come home with their first phonics home learning sheet and a phonics home learning book.
Please make sure you return your child’s phonics home learning book every Thursday so we can add new graphemes and tricky words.
PE
PE starts next Friday. Please make sure your child comes to school in their PE kit. Our Uniform policy has a really helpful PE kit guide if you need some help!
Families
I look forward to seeing you all at the second Welcome to Reception meeting on Monday at 6pm.
Best start in life
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has written a letter to parents with a focus on ensuring children have the best start in life. It signposts parents to the best start in life website – there’s information on Best Start Family Hubs and support with your child’s early health and learning.
Maths – Number formation
This week in maths, the children looked at their number formation again. Building on from the previous week where they looked at identifying and writing numbers up to 20, they worked on identifying and writing numbers to 40, or in some cases even higher. I was really impressed with the work they produced, the support they showed each other and their attitudes towards learning. Well done Year 1! You are all super stars!
English text
The children are enjoying our current class novel, Yours sincerely Giraffe by Megumi Iwasa.
Help at home: Ask your child what is happening so far in this fiction text.
PE – Castles and Cannon Balls
In PE, we worked together as a team to build castles using different pieces of equipment. This challenged us to use our resilience and communication skills. Once our castles were built, we had great fun using balls, quoits and beanbags to try and knock them down!
Maths
This week in Maths, we’ve been practising counting in tens from 0 to 100.
For example:
0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50…
0 tens, 1 ten, 2 tens, 3 tens, 4 tens, 5 tens…
We’ve also been learning how to represent multiples of ten using both words and numerals. One important discovery is that every multiple of ten always ends with a zero.
To help us, we’ve been using the stem sentence:
“___ is made of ___ tens. ___ is a multiple of ten.”
We’ve been practising showing numbers in lots of different ways on our whiteboards too.
Well done Year 2!
Help at home:
- Practise counting in tens together. Start from 0 and go up to 100 (0, 10, 20, 30…). Then try counting backwards from 100 to 0.
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Ask your child to represent multiples of ten in different ways (e.g. using coins or drawing groups of ten).
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Say a number (like 40) and ask your child to complete the stem sentence:
“40 is made of 4 tens. 40 is a multiple of ten.”
Maths: column addition
We’ve started maths in Year 4 by reviewing the column addition they learnt in Year 3. I’ve been really impressed with how quickly your children have picked this back up.
We initially used Base 10 to help us represent the addition and when we were confident we moved onto just using the column method.
We revisited exchanging and discussed how we know when to regroup in column addition.
If the column sum is equal to 10 or more, we must regroup.
Help at home: ask your children to identify which of the following calculations will need regrouping? How do they know?
329 + 132
322 + 125
573 + 143
242 + 635
Maths: number bonds to 100!
We’re at the beginning of our maths journey in Year 3 and we’re applying our knowledge of numbers bonds to 10 to support us with our number bonds to 100.
For example:
If I know that: 3 + 7 = 10
Then I also know that: 3 tens + 7 tens = 10 tens
and I can work out that: 30 + 70 = 100
Similarly for subtraction:
If I know that: 10 – 3 = 7
Then I also know that: 10 tens – 3 tens = 7 tens
and I can work out that: 100 – 30 = 70
Repeat the phrase: There are 10 tens in one hundred.
Help at home by practising this strategy with your child. Can they use their number bonds to ten to support their number bonds to 100?
Welcome to Reception
A reminder that our ‘Welcome to Reception’ meeting is on Monday 15 September, 2025 at 6pm. This is held at school.
Following our first welcome session, this is an opportunity to find out some basic ‘need to knows’ about life in Reception.
We look forward to seeing you there.