Our first term together has come to an end and what a fantastic first term it has been, your children have been brilliant fun and they have worked so hard. It’s time for a well earned rest!

This week the children learnt four new sounds, h, b, f and l. The flashcards for these will go home with them today. We continued to practise blending the sounds to read words as well as reading our tricky words. The children even had to blend to read at snack time today as the bananas had CVC words written on them!

In maths we continued our focus on one more and one less as well as taking further small steps towards understanding composition of number, including lots of practical opportunities to explore partitioning a number to find different parts of the same whole.

We read the story pumpkin soup and completed practical learning tasks linked to the story, such as writing the CVC words, ‘cat, duck’ and ‘pot’. We talked about how we can make sure everyone has a turn when we work together and we had our own pumpkin soup making station in our outdoors area. We also learnt about Diwali this week. The children learned that it is a special religious celebration, the festival of light, learning linked to our growing understanding of belonging. We made Diya lamps from cardboard plates and we had our own celebration with light today (glow sticks and dancing) as a reward for filling up our classroom kindness jar right up to the top with pom poms.

We also had our first P.E. lesson this week. We had a fun lesson in the hall, playing listening games and learning how to stay in our own space and follow instructions. However, as you can imagine, the changing took quite a long time! During the half term holiday it would be great if you could let your children be as independent as possible when dressing and undressing. Show them how to turn their clothes the right way round when they are inside out and practise doing up buttons e.t.c. Also, please do check that your children have a full P.E. kit in school. After the half term holiday they will need shorts or tracksuit bottoms, a t-shirt and some plimsolls, every Wednesday morning. If your child wears tights to school they will also need a pair of socks in their P.E. kit. Please also check that all items are named, their clothes can get get muddled with the children changing close to them and it’s really difficult to know who’s is who’s if they don’t have a name on.

Thank you so much for your support, have a wonderful half term break and we will see you all again on the 4th November.

Jo Bentley

Please do not hesitate to email me with any questions or queries: jbentley@stjohnsprimary.org