Dear Parents
It has been so lovely to welcome everyone to Goldsworthy Class and we have been so impressed by the way the children have settled into a new school year, taking all the different procedures in their stride. We are delighted to have a lovely class and are really enjoying getting to know everyone.
Here are a few pieces of information that might be useful – but do get in touch if you have any queries and we are always happy to chat after school if you have any concerns. You can catch Mrs J on Mondays and Fridays and Mrs W on Tuesdays. Mrs K will see the children out on the other days but is always happy to pass on messages.
Equipment
Please keep the equipment that the children bring in to a minimum. PE kits can be kept in school and will only sent home if they get wet/dirty. Otherwise they can stay in school until half term. Water bottles must be named and it helps if snack boxes are also named. It is also really important that the children’s uniform is named so things don’t get lost.
Please ensure you send a healthy snack and remember no nuts! As the weather changes, warm coats, wet weather kit and wellies really help the children enjoy break times and ensure that they can get out whatever the weather for that vital fresh air and roar about! PE will usually be on Wednesdays and Thursday or Friday. The weekly timetable (always subject to change of course!) can be viewed here.
Reading
We will endeavour to change reading books whenever they are put into the ‘book changing’ box. However, we would be grateful if parents could please write the name of the book into the reading record so that it reduces the time taken to change the books! (we will be keeping a record of the books read in our file)
In year 2, the curriculum become more demanding and so it is not possible to hear all children read every day. We will be having whole class reading and group reading sessions every week and there will be a group of children who will read with an adult most days. However, most children will only be heard reading by an adult once or twice a week and so it is really important that they read with you at home and listen to a wide range of books being read to them.
Spellings and home learning
In the first term, we will be working on the spelling patterns covered in the first five phonics phases and ensuring children can read and spell words with these letter strings. For some children this will consolidate their learning and others may find they are working on new digraphs. We will be practicing these letter strings on a daily basis but it would help if you could get the children to practice them at home by learning the words for the week which will be loaded up on to the website weekly. They do not need to hand work in but they will be ‘tested’ each week to see how they are getting on!
If you wish to do more with your child, especially if they are off school for any reason, then there are also the termly maths skills to be practiced, education city and bbcbitesize are still available for the children to use (see links on the home page of the website) and there is a list of home learning ideas on the topic web. We would love to see any photographs, via email, of projects completed but please don’t send them in as we are sadly advised against that.
Termly Class Presentation
This term our inquiry question is ‘what helps me to stay healthy’ and we will exploring this across the curriculum, as you will be able to see from the topic web . Because of the Covid situation, we will not be able to invite you in for our normal topic presentation. However, we plan to arrange some sort of recorded presentation, giving the children a chance to showcase some of their projects. We will let you have further details when we have a better idea of how we can make it work! We will also try to regularly load photos of things we have been doing on to the website.
We have a provisional outing planned for the end of the month about which we will be in touch soon. Now we keep our fingers crossed and our sanitizer spraying and hope we have a happy and healthy term ahead of us!
With warmest wishes from The Goldsworthy Team