Dear Parents/Carers,
Happy New Year to you all and welcome back to the Spring term in Foundation Stage. Our focus for this half-term is ‘People who help us’ and we are very fortunate to have a number of special visitors including a Police Officer, a Fire Fighter and the Teddy Bear Hospital. These visitors will talk to the children about their roles and how they help people. The children will be encouraged to think about the wide range of different people who help them every day, both at school and outside of school.
Our Literacy focus for the first half-term will be Drama and writing or talking about the things we have experienced. The focus for the second half of the term changes to Non-fiction books and writing and talking about the information they provide.
Our focus for Mathematics this term begins with number and counting.
We would be grateful if you could support this learning at home by counting a variety of everyday things such as counting as you climb the stairs, counting tins of food, how many cars you see on your way home from school. Please also continue to share a variety of reading materials at home with your child.
The second half of the term sees the focus change to ‘Signs of Spring’ and we hope to be able to arrange another trip to Sefton Park. More information will be available nearer the time.
We will have three RE units to focus on this Spring, starting with Celebration, in which we will encourage the children to think about the various events that we celebrate and how we celebrate with our families, friends and communities. We will then continue with ‘Gathering’ which encourages us to think about the different ways in which we feel included, at home, in school and in Church during Mass. The final unit is ‘Growing’ and we will focus on Lent and Easter time with the children.
We will be continuing to learn Spanish with Senorita Clarke and Senora Crabtree. We will be learning the names of fruits and continuing to build on our skills already learnt in number, colours and animals.
What we would like you to do this year:
Wishing Tree - We would like to encourage you to continue your contributions to our Wishing Tree in the entrance to the setting. This is an opportunity to share the thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams that you have for your child by completing the cards and attaching them to the tree. It may be a short term goal or wish you have for your child’s achievements, a hope for their confidence, independence or reading skills. We always like to plan our topics centred on the interests of the children. You may therefore like to add an interest you know your child has onto the tree and we will aim to incorporate as many as possible.
Achievement Box – The work we do in Foundation Stage is centred around planning for the children to learn through their play and experiences. A large part of those developmental experiences also happen in the home setting and we would really appreciate it if you could share these with us. We have a golden ‘Achievement Box’ in the entrance area, in which you can add any notes you would like to share with us. It may be a trip or visits your child may have experienced out of school, or a developmental milestone, such as writing their name for the first time, counting to 10 on their own, or a change you have noticed in their confidence or speech. We always like to focus on the positives and would love to hear about your children’s achievements whilst they are with you.
Unwanted Reading Materials – The staff in Foundation continue to strive to provide a variety of reading materials for the children to experience and would be most grateful for any donations of children’s magazines and home language newspapers that you have read and no longer need, to give the children access to a number of different printed media in the setting.
We will be continuing to provide a variety of healthy and nutritious snacks for the children throughout the day, but as ever we need your support to maintain this. Without your contributions, an interesting variety of snacks would not be possible. We therefore ask for 50p from the Nursery children attending half days with us and £1 from the full time Nursery and all Reception children. We thank you in advance for your support with this.
Please remember to visit our school website and class page to see all of the wonderful things that are happening in Foundation Stage.
Many thanks for your continued support and we look forward to a happy and successful 2013.
Kindest Regards,
Mrs Downes, Mrs Head, Mrs Hurst, Miss Begum, Beatrice and Nina