Maple Class - Autumn 1, week 2

Date: 12th Sep 2025 @ 4:07pm

Well done to Maple on completing your first full week in Reception. They’ve all done brilliantly, but were rather tired come Friday afternoon!

This week our book focus has been Tabby McTat by Julia Donaldson. We have thought about when we may have lost something or had to be brave and In PSED on Friday we thought about resilience and talked about how Tabby McTat demonstrated resilience in the book. We thought about how different children demonstrated resilience this week in school and celebrated this.

In phonics we have been focusing on going over Level 1 phonics and in particular rhyming and rhyming word strings.

In maths we have been counting up to 5, and then 10. We also looked 3d space, building dens and enclosed spaces for the small world animals.

In PE we did our first cricket session. It was a brilliant and the children coped really well with their first PE session, especially as it was lead by a new adult, Steve, who was from Chance to Shine Cricket. On Friday we were hoping to go outside and practice our throwing and catching skills, but it decided to rain and thunder, so we decided to stay inside and do some yoga instead. We did a Cosmic Kids We’re Going on a Bear Hunt yoga and the children were amazing and concentrated so well. We always start and end our yoga sessions by sitting with our legs crossed, hands together and saying 'Namaste"

Children have continued to enjoy our Dough Disco sessions, where we are working on building up the muscles in our hands to make us ready for writing. Mrs Hopkins has been doing Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle sessions, which works on their upper arm strength.

We did venture into the Forest School area on Thursday, where we explored the area and went over our Forest School rules – “No pick, no lick, be careful with the stick”. And we learnt how to safely walk around the area, especially the firepit area.

We have all continued to explore the indoor and outdoor areas, learning how to use the areas safely, working together, communicating, sharing and tidying up.

We loved inviting our parents in for our Stay and Play session on Thursday afternoon. Thank you to everyone who came, the children all loved showing you their classroom and you joining in with our Explore and Learn time. This followed on from our meeting on how we teach Phonics in Maple class, the powerpoint has now been e-mailed out to you for those of you who missed the meeting or would like to recap what we went over. You can also find information on our website under Our Learning > Our Curriculum > Phonics page of the website, but do come and speak to us if you have any further questions or have problems logging into your Twinkl Learner page.

We have continued to think about our school value this term – Respect. We have been talking about what this means and looking for people demonstrating respect within the classroom. Well done to Rogan this week, who was awarded a certificate in assembly this week for being a brilliant role model for this.

Well done also to BeaBea, Joey and Olivia who were also awarded certificates in our Celebration Assembly this afternoon.

Have a wonderful weekend and we look forward to seeing you all next week.

What the children said they enjoyed this week:

Myles - Playing with Eddie

Lili - My mummy coming

Ruby - Playing with my friends

Arlo - Drawing the cat

Ottilie - Playing with Olivia and Ruby

Olivia - When my mummy came to play

Joey - When mummy came

Rogan - I enjoyed my mummy coming

BeaBea - I enjoyed playing with Rogan