Class Teachers: Mrs Towriess and Mrs Gregory
Teaching Assistants: Mrs Wilkinson and Mrs Cockcroft
Welcome to Ash Class, also known as the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) which is part of Key Stage 1.
Please check this page regularly to see updates of what we are learning.
Drop off time: 9.00am
Drop off/collection point: Gates to KS1 yard
Lunchtime: 12.00-1.00pm
Collection time: 3.30pm
You will have received a letter informing you of the name of your child’s Key Person. This adult is a named practitioner who is there to help your child develop confidence and feel safe and secure in school. Please feel free to speak to your child’s Key Person, or any member of the EYFS team, if there is anything you would like to discuss or share with school. If your child develops new interests at home, please do let us know so that we can use that information to promote learning.
The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is how the Government and early years’ professionals describe the time in your child’s life between birth and age 5. Your child’s attendance in the Reception class at St James’ Church of England Primary School forms the final phase of this initial stage of your child’s learning journey.
At St James’ we aim to provide learning experiences that are happy, active, exciting and fun – supporting children in their crucial early development and learning needs.
The Early Years curriculum is called the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework. It contains seven areas of learning and development.
Prime areas of learning:
1. Communication and language
2. Physical development
3. Personal, social and emotional development
Specific areas of learning:
1. Literacy
2. Mathematics
3. Understanding the world
4. Expressive arts and design
These seven areas are used to plan your child’s learning activities.
At the end of the EYFS – in the summer term of the Reception year in school – teachers complete an assessment which is known as the EYFS Profile.
It states whether your child has reached expected levels in the seven areas of learning at the end of the Reception year. These expectations are called the Early Learning Goals (ELGs). It also describes your child’s attainment in the three essential characteristics of learning:
· playing and exploring;
· active learning;
· creating and thinking critically.
Important Documents – Reading
We strongly believe that all children should experience high quality books that enhance literacy skills and inspire them to read. We aim for children to develop a love of reading and this will help motivate them to write. Here are some documents that will help you with our ‘School Improvement Priority 1 – Reading’
To help with this we are sharing a fabulous and highly recommended list of ‘100 Books to Read…’
Reading Spine takes place daily in every classroom where the children are read to. Each of the books help to develop the imagination of our children and equips them with language. We want our school to be a place where children are read to, enjoy, discuss and work with high quality books. We use the Pie Corbett Reading Spine so that children have access to high quality texts and develop a love for reading!
Supporting Reading at Home
Please see below for documents which will help when you are reading to your child at home.
Linked to the topic of ‘Valuing Difference’, we will be completing activities to develop communication skills of listening to others, taking account of what others say, responding appropriately and with sensitivity.
Please ensure your children come to school in their outdoor PE kit for PE. Outdoor PE kit includes a white top, navy tracksuit bottoms, a navy jacket/waterproof coat and a pair of trainers.
In PE we will continue to develop fundamental skills of running, jumping, hopping, throwing and catching.
We will follow the exciting activities from Burnley Schools Sports Partnership which can be practised and performed both at home or in school.
We would like to say a big well done to Theo from Ash Class who has been taking part in the Burnley Sports Partnership Active Bingo. Theo took part in lots of the challenges and has won a bag full of sports equipment! Well done Theo! All of us at St James’ are so proud of you!
October Challenge
The October Challenge for Ash Class was to run 10 laps of the school hall and we all succeeded! We were amazing!
For our PSED, we are looking at four themes now that we are all back together in the classroom – self-efficacy, hope, gratitude and connectedness. We will be learning that we can make a difference and how we can use our strengths when things might be difficult, encouraging one another.
We will be linking our prior knowledge of Noah’s Ark to thinking about hope and how the rainbow symbolises hope. We are always thinking about what we are thankful for in school and will continue this and we will promote connectedness by all being together again in the classroom!
Reading
In Ash Class, we enjoy Reading Spine at the end of the day. This continued throughout lockdown and we read so many books, which we thoroughly enjoyed! We then recommended books to each other, thinking about why our friends would enjoy them. Here are some of our recommendations…
Author Visit
We had a virtual visit from the one and only Dan Worsley! He told us all about his books and told us a story about a pirate. This is the first time we have met Dan and we really enjoyed meeting a real author! Here are some of our thoughts…
Writing
In EYFS, we are working extremely hard on our gross and fine motor skills. We practice these skills throughout our curriculum. Please click on the link to see how we form our letters. We are working hard on this in all our learning, both indoor and out!
Please also click on the link below to see how we approach writing in our school
In our Literacy unit, we read ‘Max’s Jungle Adventure’ and heard about all the different animals he saw on his adventure. We described different animals and enjoyed playing a ‘Guess Who?’ game, giving clues about what the animals looked like to see if our partner could guess the animal! Some animals were mixed up and we had to sort them into the correct habitat. We then wrote our very own fact file about a chosen animal. Here are some examples of our fabulous writing…
In Maths we have been learning about the composition of numbers. We started with 5 then moved on to 6, 7 and 8. Here are some photographs of our learning…
We have been learning making comparisons between heights and lengths. We have also learnt about capacity and ordered objects using mathematical vocabulary.
Ash Class have been working very hard with combining two groups. We have practiced this in lots of different ways using a variety of objects.
We then moved on to comparing numbers, using the vocabulary ‘more’ and ‘fewer.’
We have been using what we know about numbers to find different ways to make 10. We have been using the tens frame to help us.
Our focus for Spring term is to compare and contrast different environments. We will link this to our topic of ‘Space’ whilst we learn about the solar system including stars, planets and moons. We will make an information booklet to record our new learning.
Technology – we will focus on managing online information and maintaining healthy relationships whilst online.
We have been exploring hot and cold colours, looking at the work by other artists and talking about how the colours make us feel. We made our own colour wheels and sorted the colours into hot and colour colours.
Here are some of our responses:
“Hot colours make me feel happy and cold and plain colours make me feel sad.” – Charlie
“Lucie likes bright colours best because they make her feel happy. Even though Lucie likes bright colours she actually preferred the paintings by Van Gogh which used cold colours.” – Lucie
“Red, orange and yellow make Amelia feel excited. Amelia thinks these are pretty colours.” – Amelia
In RE we have been introduced to stories from The Old Testament. We know that Jesus would have listened to these stories when he was growing up. We thought about how the people in the story would have been feeling. Each lesson we thought about what we had learnt previously and we completed a quiz online to check what we had remembered about the stories, making sure the learning was ‘sticking.’ Here are some of our favourite Bible stories, Moses, Daniel in the Lions’ Den and Noah’s Ark…
Remembrance Day
Take a look below at our Remembrance Day creations.
