Ladybird Class

Communication and language

The children will start the term by learning to listen to others when playing in with one friend or in small groups, e.g. talk about families in circle time and share pictures. They will join in with repeating refrains and anticipating key events and phrases in rhymes and stories e.g. in songs, poems, familiar stories, call and response games. Pupils will understand use of objects and tools in the classroom e.g. children know what they can do during independent free flow time. Children will learn to respond to multi-step instructions e.g. first we need to put our coats on, then we need to zip them up, then we will get ready to go out to play; retell past events from stories and from own experience in chronological order; e.g. describing a day at school, describing what they did at the weekend.

Physical Development

In PE lessons, we will study the Introduction to the PE unit of learning. In this unit children will be introduced to Physical Education and structured movement. They will spend time learning basic principles of a PE lesson such as safely using space, stopping safely, using and sharing equipment and working individually, with a partner and group. They will take part in activities which will develop fundamental movement skills such as running, jumping and skipping. Children will also play simple games and begin to understand and use rules. As in all units, pupils develop physical, social, emotional and thinking whole child objectives.

In everyday activities, we will focus on the gross motor skills, coordination and balance. The children will develop their pencil grip through a variety of every day fine motor skills opportunities.

Our PE day is Friday.

PSED

The students will learn classroom and school rules, and how we all help to make our classroom a safe and happy place to learn. Children will gain confidence through choosing and accessing resources. They will explore the things that make each of us special, as a part of our PSHE curriculum. Children will explore their and other’s feeling and consequences of some actions, they will learn words we can use to describe how we are am feeling and what to do when feeling angry, upset or worried. The pupils will learn to take turns, begin to work in a small group or with a different partners.

Literacy

The children will access a variety of high quality texts, based on their interests. The children will explore fiction, non-fiction and poetry linked to the theme studied this half-term. They will develop a greater appreciation of books and learn how to look after books in school, while developing and celebrating their love of sharing stories.

The students will start visiting the school library; this half term our library time will be Tuesday afternoons.

In Phonics, we will learn to read all of the single letter Set 1 sounds at speed. The children will practise blending sounds orally through Fred Games and everyday opportunities.

In writing, the children will learn to write their names and begin forming graphemes correctly, developing their understanding of the correspondence between graphemes and familiar phonemes.

Mathematics

Our first unit of learning will focus on children’s ability to recognise, represent and manipulate numbers to 5. Children will begin by counting groups of objects up to 3, then 4, before looking at 5; they will learn to recognise and count different representations of numbers up to 5 and use a five frame to help structure the counting and reasoning.

We will then move onto identifying similarities and differences in sets of objects found in the classroom. Children will sort objects into two groups based on size, colour and shape. They will discover that groups can be sorted in different ways and into more than two groups.

We will finish this half term with comparing groups within 5. In this unit, we will focus on comparing two groups of objects and correctly identifying which has more, fewer or whether they have the same amount, using matching, representing and subitising strategies.

Understanding of the word

Through this half term’s topic All About Me, the students will explore the themes of my family, my school, my environment, the people around me, people who help us.

We will study our faces and bodies while learning about the human body:  facial

features, main body parts and the senses.

We will introduce the seasons of the year and observe the changes in our

environment that indicate Autumn. The children will be introduced to deciduous and evergreen trees, observe leaves using magnifying glasses and look for leaves changing colour.

As an introduction to later study of history, we will introduce the concept of past, present, future and discuss children’s past as well as that of others, including characters from stories. We will look at our families - when I was a baby, when my family members were young; as well as Family Trees and diverse representations of family life. The children will develop sense of chronology, i.e. before I was born, before I came to school, which classroom will I be in next year? We will also use the concept of chronology to understand our school year – what will we do this year in Reception?

The children will explore the location of our school and the wider local area – we’ll discuss our routes to school: What do we pass? Do we use transport? The children will reflect on what they like about our local area and what would they change? We will define Community as the people who feature in our lives, and learn that our school is an important part of our community, as are friends, families, religious communities, people with shared interests e.g. hobbies. We will also study people who help us in our community; including but not limited to teachers, doctors and nurses, firefighters, police, shop workers, rubbish collectors.

Expressive Arts and Design

We will begin the term by learning what art is and that artists makes art by expressing the things they see, imagine or feel. We’ll explore how artist make art and that they use different elements to create their work.

We will look closely at one of the elements of art – colour. The children will learn about colour by painting with primary colours and mixing secondary colours. We will study the works of Miro and painting our self-portraits.

Towards the end of the half-term we will learn that instruments are grouped based on how they make sounds and we’ll look closer at examples of percussion instruments – instruments that make sounds by beating or scraping. We will practice playing a simple beat on a selection of percussion instruments, focusing on rhythm and tempo. We will explore the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Allegro from A Little Night Music.