Now we are in Term 5, we will be  continuing to learn the sounds in Basics 3. Once we have completed the set, we will spend the rest of the term reviewing and revisiting these sounds. This is to ensure children are secure in thier application and support them in their writing and reading. By the end of Basics 3, the children will have been taught one sound for the 44 phonemes in the English language. The children will continue to work on segmenting and blending sounds and applying their knowledge of what they have learnt. We will continue to read and write sentences as well as phrases. Please practice both Basics 2 and Basics 3 sounds with your child to support quick recall. The sound mats can be found at the back of the reading journals.

We are also continuing to consolidate and learn new Tricky Tess words (common exception words). Please continue to practice those tag words that are at the back of your child’s reading journal. These are words that they need to recognise by sight as they cannot be decoded with their phonics. It will support their learning going forward into year 1, if they can recognise them and also spell them.  

Our phonics scheme is Supersonic Phonic Friends. They use characters that help the children in their phonics sessions. These include: Listening Len, See it Sam, Segmenting Seb, Blend with Ben, Build with Bill, Read with Rex, Write with Ron, Tricky Tess. Please ask your children about who’s who, they are brilliant at knowing them and what their skill is.

Basic 2 sounds: s, a, t, p, i, m, n, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, l, ll, ff, ss

Basics 3- j, v, w, x, y, z, zz, qu, ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, er, ear, air, ure - 

Basics 2 and 3 sound mats can be found in the boxes at the bottom of this page.

Please ask the FS staff if you would like a hard copy for home.

Term 5

This term our enquiry question is - What jobs to minibeasts do?

In term 5, we explore a range of different minibeasts, focusing on their roles in our ecosystems - what jobs they do!  We have our own minibeast visitors in class - caterpillars - and will be enjoying learning about their life cycles, as they grow and change.  Within term 5, we will also have a week away from our enquiry question, where we will be linking our learning to World Earth Day, thinking about how climate change is altering our world, and what we can do to improve our planet and specifically, changes we can make to our school environment. 

We have visits planned to our local library.  We will enjoy the walk there and learning about libraries whilst there. 

In RE, we look at places that are special to us personally, and places that are special to different religious groups. 

During PSHE we continue to follow the Jigsaw programme focusing on ‘Relationships’. 

Some of the books we will be using this term are:

Norman the Slug with the Silly Shell

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Journey Home

Supeworm

Tad

The Bumble Bear

We are continuing to follow the NCTEM Mastering Number scheme, alongside supplementary materials from White Rose to support our maths learning. We will focus on recapping (and extending) what has been learned about subitising, counting, ordinality, cardinality, compositions and comparison. We will practice the concept of subitising which is where we look and say an amount, without counting. We will talk about counting and how many there are altogether. We will look at the composition of numbers e.g.  seeing that 5 can be made of 3 and 2.  We will learn about special pairs of numbers - doubles.  We will also continue to look at the differences between odd and even numbers. In addition to this, we will continue to practise our estimation skills using our estimation station.

We will also look at 3D shapes: their properties, names, and how they differ to 2D shapes.