Welcome to Robin Class!

2024-2025 Class Information

Miss Limer is the class teacher and Miss Culver is the teaching assistant.  Mrs Gregorious and Ms Rochford are in Wrens class and also support the children with their learning.

PE

PE is on a Thursday morning. The children need to bring their PE kits to school every Thursday.  These can stay in school and will be sent home at the end of each half term.  

Outdoor Learning

The outdoor area is always open for the children to access and is an integral part of learning in EYFS.  Please ensure the children have boots and clothing appropriate for the weather in school every day as we go outside whatever the weather.

The children will have weekly 'Welly Wednesdays' They will need boots and a change of clothes to keep in school to take part.

Reading Expectations

Frequently sharing books with your child and talking about the main characters and sequence of events will support your child to develop their comprehension skills.  Please ensure that you read with your child at least five times a week when they begin to bring books home following the school's reading scheme. After reading their phonic book, please record this in their reading diary including the date, the name of the book and a signature from the adult who has read with them. You may also want to comment on whether your child enjoyed the book or if they found it easy or difficult. The number of reads will be counted up at the end of every week, so it is important the children have their reading diary and their books with them. The children in Robins and Wrens will be issued with a Loyalty Card if they have read at home five times that week they will receive a punch on their card. A full card will lead to prizes for your child! From each class to become the Reader of the Week and receive a certificate for this. 

Letterjoin

Letterjoin is a great website to help the children practise their pre-cursive letter formation, and we encourage the children to access it. It can be accessed via any touchscreen device, and login details will be sent home shortly.

Numbots

Please support your child to interact and engage with Numbots on a weekly basis. Numbots will support the development of your child’s mathematical understanding and in particular their subitising skills. You will receive a login soon, which will outline how you will be able to log onto Numbots.

At The Round House Primary Academy, we have an 'open door policy'. We welcome you to discuss your child, their progress or any concerns you may have. We might not be able to talk to you straight away but we will endeavour to speak to you as soon as possible. You can also leave a message with the school office or send an e-mail to the school office who will pass it onto us - office@roundhouse.cambs.sch.uk

Our parents, carers and families are all part of the learning journey. The adults at school would like it very much if you could share any WOW moments by uploading an observation onto Tapestry. It is wonderful to find out what the children have been up to with you at home and they love sharing this with their friends in class.

Reception Curriculum Overviews:

Promoting British Values in Reception:

Democracy:

Speaking and listening activities promote discussions.

Making decisions together.

Listening to each other’s opinions.

Turn taking, sharing and collaboration.

Individual Liberty:

Freedom for all.

Developing a positive sense of themselves.

We listen to every child through pupil voice.

Through our PSHE curriculum the children’s rights are promoted.

The children are encouraged to make the right choices about how they learn and how they behave.

Mutual Respect and Tolerance:

The classroom rules help children to understand how to share and look after each other.

The children learn about different cultures, faiths and religions. They are encouraged to show respect and tolerance for different people, faiths, cultures and languages.

The children study art and listen to music which reflects multicultural Britain.

The children celebrate special days and festivals throughout the year.

Rule of Law:

The children learn about their rights and responsibilities. They also learn about consequences of behavior and also learn to distinguish between right and wrong.

The children agree to abide by the rules and understand that these rules apply to everyone.

The Characteristics of Effective Learning:

The characteristics of effective learning are important learning behaviours that we support the children to develop throughout the reception year. They are split into three categories:

Playing and Exploring - Engagement:

Can I do this?

Active Learning - Motivation:

Do I want to do this?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/help-your-child-try-new-things

This is a useful website to explore the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, to find out more information about how to help your child to try new things at home and to develop a growth mindset. 

Creating and Thinking Critically - Thinking:

How do I do this? 

We can help children to become effective learners by playing with them, listening and responding to them, acting as a sound board, supporting them to pursue their own interests, inspiring them, modelling discovery learning and both guiding and supporting them (without taking over). 

Home Learning Tips and Advice:

Reading

When listening to your child read, encourage them to point to each word as they say them, to help them develop one to one correspondence. Encourage your child to use the pictures to help them if they are stuck on a word and help them to sound the word out using the phonemes they have been learning in phonics. Remember to use 'pure' sounds for each phoneme, avoiding adding on 'uh' after each sound. For example, 's' is pronounced 'ssss' rather than 'suh' and 'm' is pronounced 'mmm' rather than 'muh'. If your child takes a while to read a sentence, reread it back to them before moving on to the next page (whilst pointing to each word), so that the meaning of what they have read is not lost or forgotten. After reading, ask your child to retell the events of the story and answer some comprehension questions. If your child is not enjoying the book or is struggling, leave the activity and come back to it later. We want to develop a love of reading in our children, not for it to become a forced practice. Encourage your child to spot words on signs, around your house and in magazines, recipe books and newspapers. When you are reading a bedtime story, have your child spot and count all of the tricky words they can find, or have them search for a particular word on a page. 

Writing

When your child is completing a written task, e.g. writing a sentence, encourage them to first decide what they are going to write in full. Have them say this sentence out loud in their normal voice, a silly voice, a quiet voice and a loud voice. This repetition will help the order of the words stick in their mind when they come to writing it down. Remind your child that a sentence must begin with a capital letter and that they should use finger spaces, a full stop at the end of the sentence and to try and keep their writing as close to the line as possible. Finally, after writing the sentence, have your child read the sentence back to themselves, and to you, to check it makes sense. When your child is writing, allow them independence in sounding out words before writing them, and encourage them to use the phonemes and graphemes they have been learning in phonics. Even if their spelling of a word is not technically correct, if it is phonetically plausible, allow this. For example, 'yoonikorn' would be an excellent attempt at 'unicorn' and one that we would celebrate in Reception for the use of the phonemes. Finally, encourage your child to use the pre-cursive font (found on Letter Join) at all times, but without joining the letters. Using this font will help your child in the long run as the foundations of the cursive font expected of them in later years will be in place already.

Maths

In maths, the emphasis is on developing a solid understanding of number and pattern and less on writing down numerals and number sentences. The principle of 'concrete, pictorial, abstract' representations of number is key to developing this understanding, with children first creating a concrete representation of a number through building a tower or model using the specific number of bricks/counters. Next, the children would then be encouraged to draw the number, creating a pictorial representation of four rabbits/four flowers/four cars etc. Finally, and only once the first two steps were completed, would the children be asked to write the abstract representation, in this case the numeral. Maths Mastery methods are an excellent way of helping your child to develop a strong understanding of number and pattern, focusing on talking about number and pattern, explaining how something is known and how the child came to the answer they did. In all maths based activities, ask your child 'how do you know?' after they tell you an answer.

Our Learning

Autumn 1 - Settling into school/Ourselves

This half term we are focussing on getting to know the children, we will be reading:

'Have you filled a bucket today?'

'The Colour Monster'

'All are welcome here' 

'The Great big book of Families'

These texts will encourage talk around the children's emotions, families and what makes them unique. 

08.09.25 - Have You Filled A Bucket Today?

This week I have been so impressed with how all of the children have settled in, they are working hard, being kind and learning lots through purposeful play. Our focus this week was being ‘bucket fillers’ we read ‘Have you filled a Bucket Today” A story all about kindness.

We also introduced our phonics and maths lessons.

In phonics we have been learning the sounds ‘s, a, t, p’ we listened carefully to hear the first initial sound in words such as: sun, apple, tap, penguin and practiced forming our letters. At this stage, the children also practice oral blending which is the skill of hearing a word sounded out like, ”s-u-n” and ‘blending’ it together to hear the word ‘sun’.

In Maths we have been practicing our subitising skills - the ability to ‘see’ amounts without counting. We used counters to arrange groups of 1, 2 and 3.

Within the classroom to help segment the children’s learning about being bucket fillers, we had several activities that included: making kindness potions, drawing what ‘fills our buckets’ and filling buckets to match the amount of dots. We also had lots of outdoor play practicing key skills such as team work and collaboration to accomplish what we set out to do.

We also have been making our own Robins, these are displayed in our classroom corridor to help with our own class identity because we are one big team! Well done Robins!

15.09.25 - The Colour Monster

This week in Reception we read the Colour Monster, a story all about identifying emotions. 

In phonics we learnt the sounds ‘I, d, n, m’ and had a go at blending short words. We have been blending short words such as ‘d-i-p’ and ‘n-a-p’ ! To support your child at home you could start to sound out simple words such as ‘Please, put on your c-oa-t’ or ‘Can you see the ‘d-o-g?’

In Maths we practiced counting to 5 and discussed strategies to help count carefully: lining objects up, stopping at the last object, staying focused…

We also started ‘Drawing Club’ - An approach to writing invented by ‘Greg Botrill’ the idea is each week we take a character or setting from our focus book (Colour Monster) and draw it, we then writing a ‘code’ to make something magic happen to our drawing. We have been practicing our pencil grip with pre-writing patterns as our codes and loving seeing the magic happen!

22.09.25 - The Colour Monster Goes To School

This week we have been reading “The Colour Monster goes to school”! We used this to inspire our learning.

We have really got the hang of drawing club now! We have been drawing our own Colour Monsters with a rucksack full of surprises! We practiced our pencil control by doing some writing patterns as our “code” to make something magic ‘pop out!’

In phonics we have been learning “g, o, c, k” and we introduced our new tricky word “is” We explain to the children that the “tricky part” is the /s/ sound which is pronounced as /z/.

In maths we have been looking at the structure of number.
We now know that 2 is made of 1 and 1,
3 is 1 and 1 and 1,
4 is 1 and 1 and 1 and another 1! Or … 4 is made of 3 and 1!

We practiced with a teddy bear picnic where each teddy needed 1 item but altogether there are 3! We also built towers of 4, we practiced to pick up the right amount of blocks and noticed that 4 is made up of lots of 1s too!

We also celebrated lots of home reading! Children with 5 or more reads logged in their reading journal were able to ‘punch’ their reward card. Books will now change on Mondays and Thursdays. Please leave your books in the book bag just in case books are required to change on different days and for safe keeping.

06.10.25 - "The Dot"

This week we read “The dot” a story all about having a growth-mindset, rising to challenge and being creative.

In the story we focused particularly on the quote: “Just make a mark and see where it takes you!”

We used this story to inspire our learning and introduced a new routine… our “password” The children have been practicing a circle pattern which we have been referring to as our “password”. We practiced it everywhere this week making links to our story and practicing our pencil grip through lots of forms of mark-making.

In phonics we have now learnt the sounds ck, e u & r - we explained to the children that the sound /ck/ is a “digraph” as it is “two letters, one sound” and it is found at the end of words such as “duck, lock, tick”

We also practiced a new tricky word: “I”

In Maths we have been looking at all the different ways we can represent numbers. We used 4 dots on the ground to rearrange but noticed no matter how we move them, it is always 4!

And (of course) we spent lots of time outside regardless of the weather! And loved it!