Maple class - Autumn 1, week 6
Date: 11th Oct 2025 @ 1:37pm
This week was a bit different in terms of who was teaching Maple class. Mrs Hopkins was out on her Pediatric Forest School First Aid training at the beginning of the week, so Maple class were taught by Mr Stone, who they all loved talking about when Mrs Duffey came into school on Wednesday.
This week our book focus was Superworm by Julia Donaldson. We were talking about ‘Excellence’ and how we can do our best at school and how Superworm always did his best to help others.
In phonics this week we learnt the next four sounds in our Level 2 Twinkl Phonics programme. These were i, n, m & d. Children had great recollection of the sounds we learnt last week – s, a, t, p. We have been practicing our blending and segmenting and we are getting better and better at blending sounds together for reading words. A way to support this at home is to segment a word slowly at first, identifying each sound and then say these getting faster each time, until you can blend the sounds together to correctly identify the word. Our letter formations are really improving too – well done Maple, you are working really hard at ensuring you write letters following the Twinkl formation rhymes. Mrs Duffey read with all the children individually this week and recorded this in their reading diary. It was great to see so many children have also been reading their books at home. Please remember to jot in their reading diary every time you do this.
We are still doing lots of fine motor and gross motor exercises to ensure our muscles are becoming nice a strong to help us with our writing. Our Dough Disco sessions are a firm favorite which helps with their fine motor skills (the ability to make precise movements using small muscles in the hands, fingers, and wrists). This week outside we used the large tyres to roll them to each other in pairs – this helps develop gross motor skills which involve large-scale, whole-body movements.
In maths this week we counted out lots of objects and thought about the number 6. We also counted our 6 sounds by using body percussion. We looked at 2d shapes and made pictures in pairs by combining these shapes – we had houses, rockets, patterns – great work Maple.
We have continued to learn our Harvest Festival songs, The Big Red Combine Harvester being a favorite. We have been learning the actions and also collaged our very own red tractor. In RE we discussed the Lords Prayer and thought about how special God is.
In PE we continued with cricket and also did yoga this week – which is becoming a firm favorite in Maple Class, although the children don’t always associate this with being PE!
Unfortunately, due to their only being one adult in Maple Class this week we couldn’t do Forest Schools on Thursday, but we did lots of learning during Explore and Learn in our inside and outside classrooms. We had great fun playing What's The Time Mr Wolf!
Well done to Arlo, Eddie, Elsie and Ruby this week for receiving certificates in our Celebration Assembly.
We hope you have a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing you on Monday.
