Swiss Gardens Primary School

And just like that we are half way through the school year! In Spring 2 our learning will focus around the topic of dinosaurs. Children will become dinosaur experts exploring fossils, finding out about famous palaeontologists, exploring our impact on the world through recycling and they might even encounter a surprise egg (shhhh!). 

In Phonics we will continue to work on our stage 1 song and concentrate on digraphs and trigraphs (where 2/3 letters are together representing one sound e.g. ch, igh, air). We will also be building our confidence to recognise tricky words on sight and have a go at using these when writing our own simple sentences. We will continue to practise our segmenting and blending to read words and as we gain confidence with this, begin reading more fluently. 

Below you will find our topic overview giving you an idea of the things we will be covering as well as some ideas as to how you could support learning at home. Welcome to Autumn 2! A whole half term done! The children have settled well and are enjoying school life to the full!

Welcome to Cygnet and Ducklings and the Swiss Gardens Family! 

In our first term together at Swiss we focus on settling the children into new routines, environment, friends and building their independence.

• Independence: Right from the start of term we encourage children to be independent coming in and putting their things away, self-initiating activities throughout the day, getting, eating and clearing lunch things, becoming responsible for putting on and taking off coats, jumpers, socks and shoes by themselves all the way through to organising their belongings for home time – there is an awful lot of new things to learn! We spend a lot of our initial weeks teaching the children how to do all of these things for themselves (and practising at home definitely helps too!)

• Routines: There are many new routines that we introduce, build upon and practise until the children are confident and independent, including coming in in the morning, lunchtimes and getting ready for home. Over the term we gradually increase the number of routines to include other aspects of learning, such as Song of Sounds each day, Dough Disco and Beefit PE.

• Learning environments: while as a school we don’t have the largest amount of space we work hard to ensure we make the most of all available space and in EYFS offer access to our outside area in all weathers. Children enjoy large climbing equipment, mud kitchen, sand, construction and role play to name a few! For each of these areas the children must learn about the behavioural expectations, resources they will find there and how to use, care for and tidy them away so that they can use them successfully and safely

 • Friendships: One of the most important aspects of the Autumn term in Reception is getting to know one another! The children have plenty of time through free play to build new friendships and initiate activities and games together. We also plan in carpet times and team building activities which are designed to help support and develop their social skills.

We start our day coming into class independently and completing our morning jobs. First we organise our belongings before self registering and practising writing our names. Before the class register we enjoy some self-initiated choosing time.

 During our day we will...

 - sit on the carpet for whole class adult-directed inputs such as phonics, maths or getting to know you games

- have choosing time inside in our classrooms and outside with free flow between all the spaces

 - have playtime on the main playground and enjoy a fruit snack and milk (for those who register for it)

- have some lunch followed by some outside playtime

- in the afternoon we come in and do Dough Disco to start strengthening our hands ready for writing before a session of free flow learning

- at the end of the day we sing songs and read a story before singing our goodbye song together.