Welcome to the Owls Class (EYFS Unit)

Week Commencing 15.04.24

Our theme is: Holidays and celebrations (Eid-al-Fitra/Easter, family traditions)

We hope that you and your families have had an enjoyable and restful Easter holiday. With such high levels of excitement and anticipation for Easter related festivities, we are really looking forward to welcoming all the children back and hearing about what they have been up to. 

As we move into our Summer term we will be introducing Adult Initiated Play in the mornings with a focus on literacy and maths across the week. We do this to help the children transition into key stage 1 and it will allow them to focus on key skills in these areas. They will also have a morning outdoor break time on our main playground with other year groups. 

Reading levels have been assessed for all children at the end of last term to ensure we have children on the best fit of reading practice books. Please continue to read with your children (at least four times a week).  

PE

This term our PE days will be Friday with balance bikes on Thursdays.

Literacy:

With high levels of excitement about different traditions for the Easter holidays we will be beginning our term with non fiction writing, writing an account of what we did in the Easter holidays, using sequencing words First, then, next. For our first lesson we will retell accounts of what we did in the holidays, orally to our friends. We will talk about the sequencing words first, then, next. We will draw pictures and write labels to sequence what we did. During the next lesson we will have a go at writing sentences to describe what we did, remembering to to use finger spaces and beginning to use capital letters and full stops. We will value these accounts altogether. In our third lesson we will focus on reading work to spot for mistakes. This is a great skill to begin to practise. We will teach the children that we all make mistakes, no matter what age we are and mistakes help us to learn. We will remember from our visiting scooter stuntman who told us “practise makes progress”. 

Maths:

This week, the children will continue to engage with activities that draw attention to the purpose of counting – to find out ‘how many’ objects there are. The children will also revisit the concept of cardinality – the idea that the last number in the count tells us how many things there are altogether. They will be given further opportunities to hear, join in with and develop their knowledge of the counting sequence, and, once they have become secure with their counting skills, they will be able to continue the counting sequence and be able to identify missing numbers within it. While consolidating their understanding of the word pattern embedded within most of our number names, the children will also be given opportunities to hear and practise key differences in the number names e.g. between ‘teen’ and ‘-ty’ numbers.

A key area of focus this week will be to develop confidence in counting strategies, including counting on from different starting numbers. The children will also consider strategies for counting larger numbers of objects, including those that cannot be moved. Practical activities – such as using counting wands and helping a puppet to develop their counting skills – will help to embed these key areas of understanding. During classroom routines, the children should also be given further opportunities to hear, and join in with, counts beyond 20. Adults should continue to draw attention to the pattern of the counting numbers beyond 20, e.g. by pausing and giving children time to anticipate the repeating pattern by saying, ‘twenty, twenty… ONE, twenty-two…’.

RE:

Before the holiday we discussed Easter and how the egg is an important symbol for Christians. We will recall what we know about Easter and learn about the Islamic celebration of Eid-Ul-Fitr. We will discuss what we notice and what is the same and different to other celebrations. We will think about what we have learnt using sentence, “I now know…”. We will learn that Muslims say Eid Murbarak to each other.