We will help children to describe events in some detail.

How can you support your child at home?

• Use sequencing words with emphasis in your own stories: ‘Before school I had a lovely big breakfast, then I had an apple at break time and after that I had two sausages for lunch. I’m so full!”

We will continue to encourage children to show resilience and perseverance in the face of challenge.

How can you support your child at home?

• Help your child to develop problem-solving skills by talking through how they, you and others resolved a problem or difficulty. Show that mistakes are an important part of learning and going back is trial and error not failure.

We will teach children to develop confidence, competence, precision and accuracy when engaging in activities that involve a ball.

How can you support your child at home?

• Provide different sized ‘balls’ made out of familiar materials like socks, paper bags and jumpers that are softer and slower than real balls. Use tennis balls, ping pong balls, beach balls and balloons when children are confident to engage with them.
• Play ball games with rules and targets when they have consolidated their skills.

Reading:
We will explore a range of different texts this half term. These will include: Pop-up seasons, The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, Just Imagine and Giraffes Can’t Dance. We will talk about these stories and focus on vocabulary and retell parts in our own words.

How can you support your child at home?

• Have fun with phrases from a story throughout the day: ‘I searched for a pencil, but no pencil could be found.’
• Listen carefully to rhymes and songs, paying attention to how they sound. Model rhyming and have fun with rhyme, celebrate your child’s rhyming suggestions even if they don’t make complete sense.

Writing:
We will write according to each child’s own writing journey. Children should spell words by identifying the sounds and then writing the sound with letter/s. When ready they should write short sentences with words with known sound-letter correspondences using a capital letter and full stop.

How can you support your child at home?

• Encourage your child to touch each finger as they say each sound.
• Identify St Michael’s key words that are trickier to spell. Help them to learn our ‘see and say’ words and model correct spelling.
• Support your child to form the complete sentence before writing. Help them to memorise the sentence before writing by saying it aloud.

We will increase confidence in subitising by:

• looking at structured and unstructured patterns, including those which show numbers within 10, in relation to 5 and 10

We will focus on cardinality, ordinality and counting to:

• continue to develop verbal counting to 20 and beyond, including counting from different starting numbers.

We will look at composition to:

• explore the composition of 10.

We will use comparison to:

• order sets of objects, linking this to their understanding of the ordinal number system.

How can you support your child at home?

• Play hiding games with a number of objects in a box, under a cloth, in a tent etc., ‘Seven went in the tent and 2 came out. I wonder how many are still in there?’
• Play games involving partitioning and recombining sets. For example, throw 5 beanbags, aiming for a hoop. How many go in and how many don’t?

Most learning will be child led and incidental. Our directed teaching this half term will include themes around:

• Dinosaurs – pre-historic world 
• Seasons and weather – Pop Up Seasons
• Our locality including coasts, forests and towns. 

How can you support your child at home?

• Observe and interact with natural processes, such as ice cream melting, a sound causing a vibration, light travelling through transparent material, an object casting a shadow, a magnet attracting an object and a boat floating on water.

We will continue to learn and sing entire songs. We will support children to explore and engage in music making and dance, performing solo or in groups.

How can you support your child at home?

• Play music with a pulse for your child to move in time with and encourage them to respond to changes: they could jump when the music suddenly becomes louder, for example.
• Model how to tap rhythms to accompany words, such as tapping the syllables of names, objects, animals and the lyrics of a song.