Maple Class 26-27 - Autumn 1, week 8

Date: 23rd Oct 2026 @ 3:25pm

We can’t believe we’ve reached the last week of the children’s first half term at school! The progress they have made is incredible, we are so proud of them and they all deserve a well earned rest over the holidays.

We began the week by thinking about our achievements. We linked it to the achievement of the characters in The Enormous Turnip who, by working together as a team, managed to pull it up. We shared the things that we have achieved that make us feel proud and I was so impressed with the responses from the children:

“Being able to ride my bike without stabilisers”

“Begin allowed to play in my room with my brother without an adult in there”

“Diving to the bottom of the swimming pool with my goggles on to get my swim rings”

“Putting my clothes on all by myself”

“learning to read words”

“writing my name”

We then returned to our focus question for the term “what makes me special?” and talked about all the things we have learnt this term through stories and discussion about the things that make us special – our families, a room in our house, things we enjoy doing, our friends, how we are on the inside and the foods we enjoy. We also linked this to the bible story of ‘David the singing shepherd boy’ and learnt that God chose David to be the new King of Israel as he saw what he was like on the inside and he had confidence in who he is and what he can do. You can listen again to the story by following this link. Treasure Champs. 15: Self-respect - 'David the Singing Shepherd Boy' - BBC Teach We also learnt a song about the story David the Little Shepherd | Bible Story Song for Kids | Christian Kids Songs (first song).

The children have enjoyed learning our next 4 sounds – h, b, f, l, and have both read and written CVC words containing the new sounds. They continue to amaze us at how quickly they are building their phonic skills so early in the school year. Keep up the reading over the holidays as it makes a huge impact on their progress. We have assigned some more Rhino Readers to your Twinkl Learner pages which you should be able to access over the break. Please ensure you read each book several times so the children get lots of practice at blending new words, recognising them by sight and answering different questions about the text to deepen their understanding and build their skills of inference and prediction.

In Maths, we have begun learning about number 7. We watch Numberblock episodes alongside our learning so, if you were wanting to support our learning at school, you could watch episodes from series 1 and 2 where they are focusing on the numbers (not the episodes that begin to look at addition and subtraction in series 1). As we mentioned to several of you at parent’s evening, the children are getting better and better at explaining their understanding and spotting mistakes made when counting and these foundational skills are essential for their mathematical progression.

In Forest School this week we read the story ‘Leaf Man’ and enjoyed collecting autumn leaves of different shapes and colours and using them to create our own ‘leaf’ people. We added googly eyes to bring our creations alive. We’ve also had lots of fun in our class mud kitchen this week as the children decided they wanted to dig up some weeds that had grown. We looked at the roots of the weeds and shook off the excess soil so that it could stay in our mud garden. As it has been raining, we still had puddles in our outdoor classroom so we took the opportunity to do lots of splashing in muddy puddles!

In Dough Disco we continue to enjoy exercising to strengthen the fine motor muscles in the hands and fingers while helping the brain learn to control finger movements in time to music.  This will help us with our writing.  This week we thought about all the movements we have done and combined these movements, ensuring we swap from each hand, to work each one equally.

On Friday before going home, and after introducing some yoga moves to the children, we thought about all the things we have done during our first 8 weeks at school and thought about our favourite things:

Bethan – Learning to read

Delilah – Doing phonics

Freya – Maths, making gingerbread and flapjacks, and playing in the home corner

Gabe – Making the flapjacks and gingerbread and the home corner

Jude – Gingerbread men

Luna – Learning to write my name and also making flapjacks and gingerbread men

Oliver – Forest School, making flapjacks and gingerbread men

Oscar – Going to Forest School and making the gingerbread men and flapjacks

Rosalie – Playing schools

Well done to Gabe, Delilah and Rosalie who all received certificates in our Celebration assembly today.

Thank you for all your support this term, it was wonderful to sit down and chat with you all at parents evening on Wednesday and celebrate how well everyone has settled into Maple. Have a wonderful half term and we look forward to welcoming you back in November.