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.

At bedtime, the moon and the stars come out. They shine down from the night sky. Have you ever imagined what it might be like to go on a journey to the moon and the stars? What might you find there? Who might be living there? And what is the moon really made of? Get ready to blast off as we go on a journey through space!

Talk to your child about what they have been learning in school. Their home learning is a good way to spark off some conversations, instead of ...

You:“What did you do at school today?”

Your child: “Nothing!”

• If you can, watch videos together of rockets launching or astronauts in zero gravity.
• Look at the sky together, during the day and at night. How is it different? What can you see?
• How do astronauts travel into space?
• Can your child name any planets?
• What does an astronaut wear in space? Why?

Count objects 1 -5 / 1 -10 and match to the correct numeral

Say one more than a given number / Say one less

Size, Opposites and Prepositions (up, on, over, under, around…)

Identify and describe simple 3D shapes: cube, sphere, cylinder, pyramid

Use language related to time, use timers and different ways to measure

PHONICS – Sounds in the air, c, k, ck, n, m, a, t, i, b, r

Core books: -   ‘Jack + the Beanstalk’      ‘Little Cloud’      ‘Little Bird’   ‘Whatever Next’    ‘QPootle5’     ‘Goodnight   Spaceman    ‘Meg on the Moon’  

 ‘Man on the Moon (bob)’     ‘Eliza and the Moonchild’  

Information Books: – ‘What’s Up?’   ‘Why is the sky blue?’   ‘Near, Far’  Teacher-made Space books.

*Sequencing events in a story / Retell a story using a text map (with pictures)

• Practise ordering numbers 1-5 or 1-10.
• Read books about space together and see what interesting facts you can find out.

Look out of the window. What is the weather doing today? Will it be the same tomorrow or the day after that? Weather can change all the time. It can be raining, snowing, windy or sunny. There are lots of different types of weather and each one can make a big difference to what we can do, what we wear and even how we feel. Weather happens everywhere in the world and it’s what makes where we live special. 

As we become weather watchers and learn more about the weather, we will discover there’s lots of fun to be had, whatever the weather!

• Phonics (according to your child’s phase)
• Weather Diary
• News report
• Weather investigations 

• 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

Your child will bring home a home learning book which will be sent home every Friday and collected the following Wednesday. Please ensure your child completes the activity with your support. 

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. 

Read, read, read!

Reading

Please read with your child for 10 minutes every evening. Encourage them to point to each letter and say its sound, and then to blend them together to read the whole word. Please remember to leave these books in your child’s book bag. 

Children should now know all their Phase 2 sounds. 

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

TBC