Welcome to our class page.
Below you will find lots of information about Ducklings class, including information about what we are learning.
Please do come and see me at the end of the day if you have any questions, my door is always open.
Mr Dines
Meet The Teacher presentation – Below please find the link to my presentation about key information and routines for our class.
Our topic this term is…
ALL ABOUT ME!
We will be gaining confidence whilst getting to know each other and talking about our families.
Please find our knowledge organisers below – the first document is a detailed organiser for parents so that you can see a breakdown of what will be taught during this half term. The second document is our ‘Marvellous Minds’ organiser which is aimed at supporting the children to understand what we are learning this term.
Any questions about the content, please do ask.
Welcome back to the final half term of this year – where has the time gone?
Please find below our Marvellous Minds map for this half term – our topic is “Sunnies and Cozzies” and we will be learning about staying safe in the sun, our wonderful oceans, lighthouses, beaches and Australia! So much to learn about!
As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to grab me on the gate or at the end of the day.
I hope you had a lovely half term break and are coming back to school feeling rested. This half term our topic is “Our Wild World” and we have lots to look forward to.
Please find the Marvellous Minds map below which will give you more information about the areas we will be looking at over the next few weeks.
We are really looking forward to welcoming you to our parent assembly on Thursday 23rd March. This will be in the school hall, starting at 2:45pm.
We look forward to being able to share lots of our lovely learning with you at this assembly.
Please also keep your eyes open for our ‘Wear it Wild’ day, a day where we dress up as a wild animal and hold a bake sale in aid of charity. I’ll pass on more information as soon as I can!
I hope you all had a lovely Christmas break and are ready for the new term. Our topic this half term will be ‘Healthy Me!’ and we will be looking at all of the ways we can keep ourselves physically and mentally healthy.
I have popped the Marvellous Minds Map below for you to share with your child and have a look at some of the questions we will be exploring.
As always, my door is always open, so do feel free to pop in for a chat, or book a longer appointment with me if you have any worries or concerns.
Mrs McCall and the EYFS team
Marvellous Minds – Healthy Me – Spring 1
We had a brief flurry of snow in school last week, so grabbed our wellies, gloves and coats and went outside for some snow fun! It didn’t last long, but we had lots of fun making snowballs and throwing them at Mrs McCall!! We had such a fun time!
Reception 2 – Marvellous Minds – Celebrations
Thank you to all those who came to the phonics information evening last night. There is a video clip below which explains everything I talked about to do with the ‘schwa’ sound.
We will be gaining confidence whilst getting to know each other and talking about our families.
Please find our knowledge organisers below – the first document is a detailed organiser for parents so that you can see a breakdown of what will be taught during this half term. The second document is our ‘Marvellous Minds’ organiser which is aimed at supporting the children to understand what we are learning this term.
Any questions about the content, please do ask.
This term sees us exploring a new topic “Sunnies and Cozzies”. We are heading to the beach this term, exploring a variety of texts to support our leaning. We will take a trip to Australia to look at the animals living there and explore the Great Barrier Reef. Please find our knowledge organiser for this term below:
Sunnies and cozzies – Knowledge Organiser Summer 2
Here are some photos from our ‘Wear it Wild day’ – we raised an amazing £132.33 for the WWF – well done Ducklings!
Below you will find a phonics update with all of the sounds we have been learning. Please practice these at home and also familiarise yourselves with the sounds. Some of your children are starting to add an ‘uh’ sound on the end of some of their sounds, so ‘m’ (mmmm) becomes ‘m-uh’. This will make it harder for your child to identify and use sounds in their reading and writing as they move through the phonics scheme, so it is important to get it right now.
Also look at this weblink for more on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkXcabDUg7Q (please ignore from Set 2 as this is a different scheme of work from the one we are using)
I can’t quite believe we are in our final term of our first year in Primary school! Where has the year gone…
Please find our curriculum map below which I hope will give you an overview of the things we will be doing this half term
Once upon a time – Knowledge Organiser Summer 1
We are hoping for a more settled half term, hopefully with less illness and staff changes. The trip I had planned last half term, will hopefully go ahead this half term and I will pass on more details about this as soon as I have them.
This term will also see us working towards the transition to Year 1, we will be mixing more frequently with our Year 1 pupils and the children will have an opportunity to begin to form relationships with staff, in preparation for their move in September.
Please find below our curriculum map for this half term which I hope you will find useful.
Our World – Knowledge Organiser Spring 2
This half term we are hoping for some good weather so that we can get out and about and enjoy our outdoor learning area. We have lots planned for this half term and cannot wait to get out to do some pond dipping, planting and minibeast hunting. Please keep your eyes peeled for further updates.
We have been very busy in class this term, learning all about how to keep ourselves healthy. We have talked about eating healthily and how to look after our teeth. Please watch the video above and use it at home to help you with your child’s phonics journey.
Welcome back to the Spring term, below you will find a copy of the curriculum map for this half term. As you will see, we have lots of exciting things planned and I am hopeful that we will get to go on our first trip towards the end of this half term (COVID permitting). I will, of course keep you updated with the progress of this.
Healthy Me! – Knowledge Organiser
Below you will find some photos from the end of last term:
This week we have been celebrating Motcombe’s Friendship Week!
We talked about kindness and how our words could make others feel happy and sad. We watched a short animation about how we can fill other people’s buckets with happiness by saying kind words. We talked about how this helps to fill our own bucket too as it makes us feel good to be kind.
As a class we thought about the kind words we could say to others if they were feeling sad and created a picture as we talked, filling our buckets with confetti shaped happiness.
Here are all of the sounds we have been learning for you to practice at home!
Please practice these sounds at home. Thank you.
Below you will find a maths presentation which tells you a bit more about how we teach maths in Reception and how you can help at home. I will also pop the presentation below in a PDF so you can easily access the hyperlinks at the end. I hope this is helpful to you, please let me know if you have any questions.
Below you will find two videos of the sounds we are learning. The first is just the sounds, use this if you wish for daily practice. The second one has the songs playing along with the sounds so that you can learn them at home. I really hope they are helpful.
We hope you enjoy our harvest song. We have been practising really hard to remember all of the actions to our Big Red Combine Harvester song. You can find it here…
We have enjoyed talking about the Harvest and thinking about how lucky we are to have such amazing choices of food. We are very grateful and have thanked God for our Harvest.
Spiritual Garden Visit
We also visited the spiritual garden today to lay the painted stones we had bless by Rev Pam. We thought about Harvest and said a Harvest prayer before placing our stones in the stream.
I have recorded a brief video explaining how we are teaching phonics in Ducklings class, I do hope you will find it useful.
Please find below a video of my ‘Meet the Teacher’ powerpoint. If you have any questions, please contact the office who will forward your questions to me.
We have made a class charter so that our class rules are visible. We all have a responsibility to look after each other and our classroom and we made promises to each other by making a Duckling for the wall. We are very proud of our work.
Something exciting happened today! We have two new additions to our Ducklings classroom! We will be thinking about names for our twins later today. We will let you know once we have decided.
Wow! What an incredible morning! The children settled so quickly and had lots of fun exploring the inside and outside learning zones. I was amazed at how well they listened to instructions and played with their new friends. Well done Ducklings Class!
Another great day, we started to think about our topic today and drew some self-portraits which will be displayed on the wall in our classroom. Make sure you check Tapestry for some super photos of what we have been up to here in Ducklings classroom.
Please can you make sure you have returned all forms to the office as soon as possible. Thank you.