Dear Parents,

Thank you to all of you who attended the Curriculum Sharing Evening on Monday. We hope it was helpful and gave you a good insight into the year ahead. As we explained, once the children are being introduced to more sounds and numbers, we aim to offer some online Phonics and Maths ‘helping your child at home’ sessions. Please see the previous post for a link to our presentation.

This week, the children have continued settling in to Kites and getting in to more of a routine. We have continued focusing on the skills of sharing and turn-taking, using books such as ‘The Rainbow Fish’, ‘Sharing a Shell’ and ‘We are a Family’ to aid discussion and promote ideas for choosing time. Children enjoyed participating in ‘Bucket Time’ this week. It is a great activity to aid engagement and help with impulse-control. The children created some delightful Rainbow Fish afterwards and used the story when negotiating their play.

The children have enjoyed making their favourite sandwich for cooking this week; incorporating skills of spreading, slicing, turn-taking and making independent choices. They have loved their dance session in PE this week and did a great job of getting themselves dressed. Please do keep practising this independence at home as it makes our PE lessons a lot longer and more enjoyable!

We have started Phonics this week: learning the sounds /m/ /a/ and /s/. We have been spotting the sounds and having a go at forming them on our whiteboards. We have also met King One, Tommy Two and Thelma Three in Ten Town in Maths and the children are loving it. Small activities such as counting which body parts we have 1 and 2 of and counting up to 3 objects and spotting what the pattern of each number looks like has helped the children to become familiar with these numbers. You will find your child’s login for Ten Town in the front of their reading record. If you do have some computer or tablet time at home, it would be great for the children to have a chance to practise and consolidate their skills but, be warned, the songs are rather catchy!

Next week, we will be mark marking in many different ways. We will be writing, drawing and painting with various writing instruments as well as creating artwork by leaf rubbing and printing.

Challenge: When out and about, can you spot the numbers 1,2 3 and 4 that we have been focusing on this week? Where did you find them and what were they used for? Why not take or draw a picture and bring it in for ‘Show and Tell’?

Reminders: If you haven’t already done so, please make sure that your child’s clothing is labelled as it makes it very hard to return lost clothing otherwise. We would also be very grateful if you could send in a photo of your child’s immediate family so that we can add it to our home corner. Thank you to everybody that has done this already.

Thank your continued support at helping your child to be more independent. We think that they have had a great start so far and we hope you do too.

The Kites Team