Autumn Term 2025
Autumn Term 2025
Phonics
As a whole school, we use the Little Wandle Phonics scheme. If you would like to know more about this, click on the link. The video clips will show you how to articulate the phonic sounds (phonemes) with your child.
Little Wandle Parent Information
Throughout the term we have been working hard to embed our knowledge and skills of the first sets of phonemes through our group sessions, "keep up" work and through games and stories. We have started our reading groups and each child takes home a library book and reading book each week to share with parents.
In November we invited parent to join in with our workshop to help support reading and phonics at home. It was lovely to see so many families keen to find out more information on how they can support at home too.
Dear Ms Turner and Ms Felgate,
Thank you for arranging and leading today’s phonics workshop. It was a very helpful and informative session, and I truly appreciate the time and effort you put into supporting parents in understanding how to help our children with phonics at home.
Kind regards,
Mathematical Development
We use everyday opportunities in the first half of the Autumn term to introduce mathematical language and skills to the children. When they arrive, they self-register and choose what they would like for lunch. The children put their photo onto a five frame. This gives us the opportunity to talk about the five frame being full or empty and to notice e.g. I see a two and a one, or I see three.
We also have our calendar of the year with all the children's birthdays, their photos are on ten frames so again we talk about what we notice, e.g. I can see four birthdays for the month of September. We then have our monthly calendar too, showing the children what is happening on certain days and we cross off each day so they observe the passing of time in a visual way. Alongside this, we have our visual timetable of the day so children can see what is happening over the morning and afternoon.
We share lots of songs and stories which provide us with maths opportunities too.
We follow the White Rose Maths scheme through the school, however our approach to maths has also been shaped by training undertaken with Karen Wilding of EY Maths.
Here is a link to her Youtube videos;
Communication and Language
We assessed all the children's language skills at the beginning of the term using the Wellcomm Language Assessment Tool. Following this, Ellie our Speech Therapist has organised children into groups and set focus targets for them. Some children see Ellie for 1:1 therapy and some children will also have onward referrals to the NHS Speech and Language therapist team.
We are using communication boards alongside some activities such as in the home corner, at snack time and with some games and puzzles. These help the children to develop their expressive language and sentence structures.
We love reading and sharing stories (as well as creating and telling our own!) and singing songs and sharing poems and rhymes here in Reception. All are fantastic ways to develop vocabulary!
Tales toolkit allows us to share, create and tell our own stories in a range of ways. We use props and pictures to help us share our ideas of a Character, Setting, Problem and Solution. The adults scribe children's ideas and then as our phonics knowledge develops, we become more independent at writing our own.
We use Helicopter stories as another way to develop our communication and language. This is when we tell our stories to an adult, these are written in our special book and we act them out on a stage in front of our class audience.
We have been learning lots of poems with actions through the poetry basket programme.
Christchurch park and Library visit
Reception went on their first class trip of the year. We had a lovely day visiting the library and Christchurch Park. The children were very excited to sit upstairs on the bus. They chatted about all the things they could see, noticing some familiar parts of the town.
We spent some time in the library, sharing stories and books, and choosing some to bring back to school to share at story time. We met the librarian, who helped us to check out our books and talked to us about her job role in the library.
After the library, we walked through Christchurch park, noticing changes that were happening in nature. We collected lots of items - leaves of different shapes and sizes, acorns, sticks, conkers and chestnuts. Finally, we made our way to the play area where we spent some time using our physical skills on the equipment before making our way to the bus station to come back to school.
Back at school we used all the objects we collected to support our maths learning. The children also got inspired by the story of leaf man to make some nature art!
Celebrations and Festivals..
This term has been a very busy term for celebrations, festivals and special days. We came to school wearing red to support "Show racism the red card". Next was Remembrance day where we took time to remember and think about people around the world who have been or who are dealing with conflict. As a school we raised a total of £207.31 for the Royal British Legion.
For Children in Need we made a donation to wear anything we liked. We watched some videos of children and families who had been supported by the charity so we could see how our donations can help others who need support. We made our own sparkly Pudsy Bears out of gems and playdough and created some Tales Toolkit stories where Pudsy was a character. As a school we raised £164.75.
Other festivals and celebrations we explored were Harvest Festival, Halloween, Diwali, Bonfire night and Christmas.
Visit from the owls
We were very excited to have a visit from Tonya and her owls. Tonya shared the story of Owl Babies and we played a listening game. We explored what the owls feathers felt like and we were able to hold an owl. After the session we shared some non-fiction texts to find out some more information - did you know that owls can't move their eyes? That's why they are able to turn their heads so far round! We also had a go at creating some transient art representations of owls and some close observation drawings.
