Year Groups
Upper Foundation – Ladybirds and Meerkats
-
UFS Overview of Topics 2019/20
CTA
Important information
Home Learning
We will not be putting the weekly learning on the website now that Reception are invited back into school but we would like to support you and your child by providing an overview of the half term, along with ideas and links for home learning. We will continue to communicate via seesaw and are happy for you to share your child’s home learning. Please see the Summer 2 Home Learning information sheet below to support you.
All the screen shots of resources and websites in this information sheet are fully downloadable from the links, as you scroll down our web page. Thank you.
Click on the link below for a suggested timetable should you need one, but please do not feel you have to stick to this, you may have found your own way of structuring the day which works for you.
Please click on the link to read information written by the government to support children learning at home. We have selected the information aimed at reception – Year 2.
Gov.uk Help children to learn at home
Government recommended sites for EYFS Home Learning
Let children 2-4 learn at home during coronavirus
Reading
Follow the link below to sign up to a bank of online Rising Stars reading books (similar to the books your children bring home). Don’t worry if you don’t see any books to begin with as your account needs to be approved. Allow a day or two and then log in again and the books should have appeared. There are a huge variety of books so please spend some time choosing ones that are suitable for your child. We would recommend starting with the same book band that your child usually brings home.
Reading Books Sign Up – Adult E-mail Address Required
Choose a book from Rocket Phonics to read. As a guide to which book to select;
Basic Challenge – Pink
Better Challenge – Red
Blow my Mind Challenge – Yellow
Phonics
Please continue to watch the daily lessons. They are saved in the videos section of the letters and sounds website so you can watch them at a time that suits you.
Letters and sounds have a channel on YouTube where phonics videos will be uploaded every weekday. Letters and sounds is the scheme we use in our school. This will be a good opportunity for children to practise their blending and segmenting skills and build on their phonic knowledge at home. Daily videos will be uploaded at 10am for our reception children and an additional top up video will also be available at 11.am for children needing extra help with blending. Click on the following link to subscribe.
Letters and sounds for home and school channel
Phonics BBC Bitesize Activities
Mr Thorne’s phonics and Geraldine Giraffe
Phonics phase 2 and 3 sound mat
Also try and recap phase 2 and 3 phonemes and tricky words. If you would like a challenge, you can look at the phase 4 tricky words.
Writing
Letter Formation Mat Curly caterpillar letters, long ladder letters, one armed robot letters,
zig zag monster letters
See Topic for summer themed writing activities
When we write in class, we encourage the children to say the words out loud, use their fingers to work out the number of sounds/phonemes in a word and use their knowledge of phonemes and graphemes to write the sounds they can hear, for example: feeld for field, rokit for rocket. We remind children to leave finger spaces, use a full stop at the end and begin their sentence with a capital letter.
Mathematics
https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/
Go noodle- banana banana meatball
Summer Topic Links (Covering all 7 areas of learning and development in EYFS)
Summer Themed Enhancement Ideas
Miss Sunny T-Shirt Decorating Letter
Moulding Sand Playdough Recipe
Physical Development
Playdough song- if you’re happy and you know it
Yoga, Mindfulness and Relaxation
Our Wake Up and Shake Up Song
Our Tidy Up Time Song
Welcome to Reception!
At Horbury Primary Academy, we have two reception classes. Mrs Longo teaches Ladybirds and Miss Mussa teaches Meerkats. Mrs Garlick, Miss Lord and Mrs Blunden are also practitioners within the Reception team. We work together to challenge and support your child’s learning and development in their early years.
Our children are happy and excited to learn through rich and challenging learning experiences. We have high ambitions for all our children and recognise that children have different starting points to their learning. We plan according to children’s stages of development so all can thrive and develop. We aim for children to be well-rounded individuals who are independent, resilient, and confident in themselves and with others.
Yearly overview of topics
Please click below for the yearly overview of topics
UFS Long Term Planning Overview of Topics
Indoor Provision
Outdoor Provision
Our Wow Wall!
In our reception classrooms we have a ‘Wow Wall’ so that we can record special events in your child’s life. Wow cards, completed by parents/carers, give a wonderful display of achievements and events that the children feel very proud of. They don’t need to be amazing feats, just special to your child. So it could be that, ‘Matthew rode his bike all by himself’, or ‘Jane used her knife and fork and ate all her dinner’, or ‘ Tom practised his target and wrote his name all by himself’.
Wow cards are a huge boost to your child’s self esteem and confidence, and show them that their life events are truly important to the adults around them. Each time your child brings in a new wow card, we place the previous card in their individual learning journey folders. Spare wow cards can be taken at any time from the baskets outside each reception classroom.
Please take time to read our wow cards on display!
Autumn 1 ‘Share a story’
Reception Meerkats and Ladybirds were thrilled to invite members of their family to share some of their favourite books, in our classrooms. We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who came to read with the children, it was a wonderful afternoon.
EYFS Phonics Meeting for Parents
Thank you to all our parents who came to our phonics meeting, it was lovely to see you all. We hope you found the evening informative and supportive. If you were unable to attend, you can see our presentation attached below. We have also listed a range of websites and phonic booklets to support you with your child’s phonics at home.
Useful Booklets
Useful Websites
Autumn 2 World Nursery Rhyme Week – Sponsored Event
All our reception children took part in ‘World Nursery Rhyme Week’. They learnt the five rhymes and they performed each rhyme fantastically, to Mrs Kenworthy and all our nursery children. We would like to thank all parents for your support with this and in particular for your huge effort and generosity in collecting sponsorship. We raised a total of £418.65. We used some of this money to pay for the performance for the children, from Tell Tale Hearts Theatre Company, ‘Suitcase Stories’.
Suitcase Stories
A well travelled lady captivates her audience with stories she has gathered on her journeys around the world, from Yorkshire, through Poland and on to India!
Using only the contents of her suitcase she creates landscapes of mountains and jungles, costumes for shepherds and kings and finds unique ways to bring characters to life. The children become a part of the story by helping our teller to create waves of water, make the sound of an army, hide away their dancing fairies and organise a troop of monkeys.
The performance was created to inspire children’s love of stories and enhance their knowledge of different cultures from around the world.
Our children loved listening to and interacting with the story teller. Below are some photographs for you to enjoy.
-
- The monkeys lived in a mango tree.
-
- The pirates sailed on the rough sea!
Secret Reader
Story time in reception is a very special time of the day. Each half term we will be inviting a special guest, ‘Secret Reader’ to come and read to our reception classes at story time. The children were very excited and curious when we introduced ‘Secret Reader’, this week and they loved guessing who it could be.
Autumn Term Secret Readers
-
- Miss Meggitt came to read to us, from Wakefield Library.
-
- Miss Meggitt read ‘Little Green Donkey’ by Anuska Allepuzy.
-
- The children were amazed to see who the secret reader was!
-
- Father Christmas read, ‘Shhh Santa’, by Julia Sykes. He brought the reception children sweets to share!
Thank you Father Christmas for coming to read to reception Ladybirds and Meerkats!
Autumn fun in the forest
Our children have loved exploring the Autumn season in our forest as part of their learning and development in Understanding of the world. They looked at the similarities and differences between the autumn trees and learnt about the changes in the forest during the season of Autumn. Below are some of the photographs and comments taken from our children during their explorations.
“I’ve found this leaf, it’s green brown and yellow”. Paisley
“It’s like a circle leaf, it’s brown, it’s an autumn colour”. Henry
“Look what I’ve found, sticks. We can build a campfire”. Isabella
Autumn 2 A rainy Day!
The children had lots of opportunities this week to explore the rain! Playing in the rain gives children an opportunity to learn about where the water we use comes from, that rain comes at different rates of intensity, wind affects the direction of rain, that water seeks its own level so puddles collect in holes and slanted ground.
This is what the children had to say about the rain:
“I love the rain. Look at the big puddles”. Millie
“I’m wet. I like to get my hair wet. The rain makes me cold”. Joni
“I like to splash in muddy puddles”. Billy
“Help me fill my bucket with rain. When it’s full I’ll pour it down the drain”. Joseph
“I like to get wet”. Oscar
-
- Splashing in puddles!
-
- How much rain water can we collect?
The Christmas Story
Mrs Davis, from Saint Mary’s Church, visited our reception classes. She brought both classes an advent calendar and told the children the Christmas story.
The children helped Mrs Davis tell the story with these wonderful knitted characters.
Spring Term 1
Our topic this half term is, ‘Help, I need somebody’. The children have had discussions at home and school about people in the community who have jobs that help us.
Mrs Lister kindly gave her time to speak to the children about her job as a paramedic.
-
- We all listened while Mrs Lister spoke about her job. It was very interesting.
-
- Mrs Lister showed us her helmet.
-
- We tried on the coat. It was very heavy!
Chinese New Year
We all came to school dressed in the lucky colour red, to celebrate Chinese New Year. This year is the year of the rat. The children listened to the story to learn how the years got their names. We learnt how to say Happy New Year in Chinese, Gung hay fat choy! We even tasted some Chinese food, it was delicious!
-
- We practised eating with chopsticks.
-
- We learnt about children receiving coins in a red envelope. We decorated our own envelope and took home a chocolate golden coin!
-
- Painting and writing Chinese numbers and symbols was tricky.
Winter in the forest
We put on our wellington boots and set off to hunt for signs of winter in the forest!
-
- Small shoots are emerging!
-
- The trees are bare. We spotted a birds nest and learnt that we need to feed birds in winter.
Back inside we experimented adding white to blue paint to create different shades of blue. We made some wonderful winter paintings.
‘Share a story’ – ‘Winter’ themed stories
Once again we invited our parents to share stories with us in our classrooms. Thank you to all who joined us for another special afternoon!
Spring Term 2
Pancake Flip Challenge
This week the children learnt about Shrove Tuesday and why we eat pancakes on this day. They learnt that this is a Christian tradition before the start of Lent.
Children and staff had lots of fun taking part in the pancake flip challenge, where they flipped their pancakes as many times as they could within one minute. We would like to thank all parents for your wonderful support in collecting sponsorship for this event and we will let you know the total amount raised as soon as we have collected all the donations. This will be a wonderful contribution for us towards purchasing some new books and accompanying resources to engage and enthuse our reception children even further with reading!
Below are some photographs of the children enjoying the challenge and tasting the pancakes. They were delicious. Happy Pancake Day!
World Book Day 2020
In reception the children and staff celebrated world book day by dressing up as one of their favourite book characters. We spoke about this character and designed front covers for books. We brought our favourite books from home and shared them with a year 6 reading buddy! Can you recognise which book characters we are?
Ian’s Mobile Farm
Our reception children had fun learning about farm animals as part of our new topic this half term ‘Down on the Farm.’
Ian brought a variety of his animals for the children to see up close and handle. He spoke to the children about each animal telling them interesting facts and information. Some of his animals included Floss and Candy the guinea pigs, Mr Cockerel and Mrs Hen, Quack and Quackers the ducks and Ben and Holly the miniature goats.
Please enjoy looking at some photographs taken on this truly memorable day.
-
- We brushed Domonic the donkey.
-
- Domonic was a friendly donkey.
-
- Floss the guinea pig squeaks when she’s hungry.
-
- Holly and Ben the kids are good at climbing and jumping.
-
- We enjoyed looking at all the animals.
-
- Meg the sheepdog loved her toy.
-
- Suzy the alpaca had one blue eye and one black eye.
-
- Peter the rabbit had very soft fur.
Thank you Ian for bringing your lovely animals!
Our animal paintings
We have learnt how to make secondary colours using the primary colours. We have mixed different colours to create paintings of some of our favourite animals.
