Hello everyone!

Welcome to Year R and the Year R Blog. This year we are writing our blog at the beginning of each half term to give you an overview of what we will be learning and getting up to in Rabbit and Badger class. The children have only been here a short time but they have settled tremendously well. They are steadily becoming more independent at putting their things away, finding the things they want to play with and following our daily routines. Well done YR!

This term our topic is ‘All About me’ and we will be reading the following texts: Mouse’s Big Day, Alex and Alex, The Colour Monster, This Rock is Mine and Owl Babies.

In Literacy we will be developing our mark making skills (pencil control, marks representing drawings and letters from names) and writing our names. We will also be commencing ‘Drawing Club’ where our writing activity will always be based on our book of the week.

In our Read Write Inc sessions, we will be learning 4 new sounds a week. Every couple of weeks we will be sending these sounds home for you to practise with your child. In addition, home reading books and diaries have just been given out to support the teaching of phonics, so please support us in listening to your child read their home reading book and signing the diary several times a week. Remember to colour in a star every time your child reads, but remember, only one star a day!

In maths, we will be singing nursery rhymes and focusing on identifying numbers within them. We will be exploring opportunities for counting and number within our environment as well as learning how to express our ideas through communicating with a partner. We will then progress to focussing on matching, sorting and comparing numbers within 5.

In PSED, the children will be making new friends, learning new routines and exploring new environments. They will also be exploring their emotions and how they can manage these.

In other areas of the Early Years curriculum, we will be learning about:

· Communication and Language: Daily Circle Time activities with Listening Lola

· Understanding the world: Learning simple facts about our class animals and owls, exploring signs of autumn and recognising the differences between night and day

· Expressive arts and Design: Creating Self-portraits, creating characters using a variety of materials and observational drawings.

· Physical Development: Daily Dough Disco to strengthen fine motor skills and Squiggle Time to develop gross motor skills.

We know the weeks are just going to fly by and before we know it, we will be writing the blog for next half term. We would like to finish up by adding a couple of reminders:

Reading books and diaries to be in school every day.

Water bottles in school every day.

Please name ALL children’s clothing!

Spare bag of clothes to be kept at school (including socks/tights please!)

Wellies in school

We think that’s it for now, we really look forward to working with you all and thank you for your support.

Year R Team.