Green Dragon Primary School

CALLING ALL RECEPTION PARENTS AND NURSERY PARENTS!

The school is now using a new online learning tool called tapestry in nursery and reception, which records your child’s learning journey. Please, can you download the APP.

Ms Malik (our EYFS leader) will be providing logins for parents so you are able to and see your child’s learning. It means if you do anything at home you would like to share (an activity for example such as cooking) this can be uploaded into your child’s learning journey through the APP.

Children must wear: 

• Black or grey school trousers, skirts or dresses (no jogging bottoms)
• Plain white shirt or polo shirt
• A Green Dragon sweatshirt or cardigan
• Plain black shoes – no white soles, logos, coloured ticks etc.
• Children must not wear earrings in school.
• All long hair must be tied up.
• Hair must be cut no shorter than a number 2. No embossed styles.

We are very proud of Green Dragon and wearing a smart school uniform helps to encourage and promote this sense of pride.  Please support your child by making sure they follow the rules. Thank you.

Language and good communication skills are one of the most important life skills we can learn. The ability to connect with people and to effectively communicate our ideas to others will affect our personal relationships, our confidence and feelings of self-worth, and our cognitive development. By talking we can communicate and negotiate our needs and wants successfully. We need to feel that we are heard!

• Recognising and writing numerals
• Finding 1 more and 1 less than each number
• Measuring and comparing length
• 3D shapes (sphere, cube, cuboid, pyramid)

• Core books – Paddington Bear, Winnie the Poo, Teddy Bear’s Picnic.
• Writing a recipe for Honey bread (with pictures)
• Changing a text map to create our own oral stories
• Letters and sounds: set 3: g o c k
• Revisit previous learnt sounds and tricky words. 

• At Green Dragon Primary School we teach phonics using ‘Letters and Sounds’. 

  What is phonics?
  Phonics is the system of ‘blending’ sounds together to read, and ‘segmenting’ sounds to spell. They are both complimentary and interlinking skills that are taught together. You may hear your children use some vocabulary that you are not familiar with that they have learnt in their phonics lessons.

  A phoneme 
  Is the smallest unit of sound that we use in the English language. A phoneme can be made up of one letter as in the alphabet sounds – s, a, t, p, i, n etc, or two letters (a digraph) as in sh, ch, th, ay, ar, or three letters (trigraphs) as in air, ear, ure. Phonemes can not be broken down into separate sounds.

  A grapheme
  Is the way we spell a phoneme. A phoneme may have only one grapheme,for example ‘b’. Or may have several different spellings –for example or can be spelt ‘or’ in torn, ‘aw’ in claw, ‘au’ in naughty or ‘ore’ in more. The children will initially be introduced to one common grapheme for each phoneme, but as they progress through the school they will taught the less common spelling alternatives and encouraged to try and choose the correct grapheme for a particular word they are trying to spell.

  Consonant blends
  Are made up of two or three phonemes blended together quite quickly as we learn to read. Examples are sc, sm, bl, pr, str

  Short Vowel Sounds
  Are the vowels saying their sound as ‘a’ in c a t.

  Long Vowel Sounds
  Are the vowels saying their name as ‘ay’ in day, ‘oa’ in boat or ‘igh’ in night.

  How do we teach Phonics at Green Dragon  Primary School?

  We follow the Letters and Sounds programme Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.

  There are six overlapping phases. Below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practitioners and Teachers. For more detailed information, click here to visit the Letters and Sounds website.

  Phonic Knowledge and Skills

  Phase One 
  Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.

  Phase Two 
  Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.

  Phase Three
  The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.

  Phase Four
  No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.

  Phase Five 
  Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.

  Phase Six 
  Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.
  Recommended: the Synthetic Phonics Toolkit

• Keep reading with your child at home and encourage them to talk about what is happening in the pictures.  It’s great if you point out when YOU are reading too – books, magazines, your mail, e-mails…  
• Remember your child can change their book any day and as often as you like, not just on their set days with their teacher (Penguins–Tuesdays.    Pandas–Wednesdays.     Puffins–Thursdays)

• We will  have P.E in the hall. The children only take off socks and shoes for this - they DO NOT need PE kits
• Please remember your child has to change their own socks and shoes. Please help your child to practise at home.
• Also, leggings and socks are better than tights!

• Reception children need PE kits.

• The uniform is black shorts and a white t-shirt. Please ensure clothing is all name labelled.

• School PE uniform is black shorts and a white t-shirt. Please ensure clothing is all name labelled. plimsoles are needed for PE.

• Shorts or leggings must not be over the knee as this increases the likelihood of slipping on equipment

Read stories with your child at home. Talk about the characters, settings and structure. Ask your child to retell the story. What did they like? What didn’t they like? Who was their favourite character?

Practice writing your name with the correct pencil grip.

Help your child to practice ordering numbers to 20. 

We would like your child to bring in a topic related object or item from home that they can communicate about with their peers during our weekly show and tell session. Show and Tell will take place every Friday. 

Talk about strategies you use to calm down when you’re feeling upset or angry and help your child to practise some techniques.

• Count to 10 and breathe deeply.
• Think about some things that make you happy. 

• Focus on the things that you can hear, smell, see and touch. 

Arrive on time!

Remember that the children come straight to our big carpet when they arrive, so if your child is late, they miss an important part of the learning for the session.

If you go to the Cbeebies website, your child can find out all kinds of things and play games. If you find any otherreally good sites – do let us know! 

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/Phase3Menu.htm

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Search.aspx?Subject=37

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/alphablocks​

http://www.ictgames.com/resources.html

http://www.crickweb.co.uk/Early-Years.html

Friday 1^st November:

Tapestry will be going live. Over the half term you will receive an email to register your accounts- please do this prior to this date. Any problems please speak to your class teacher.

Wednesday 6^th November:

Parents into class: We would like to welcome you into class for an hour in the morning to come and play with your child.