Welcome to Reception! Our Foundation Stage Team want you to enjoy your first year at school. We are here to help you make lots of new friends whilst we have fun learning together! The Happy Hippos (class 1) will be on their school adventure with Miss Tyler, Miss Crabtree and Mrs Bucknall whilst the Brave Bears (class 2) will be journeying with Mrs Burton, Miss Fairbrother and Mrs Offord. We want the very best for all the children in our care and are looking forward to working with you this year as we help your child be brave, kind and happy. 

We are special!

Week beginning 22.4.24

We have loved looking at the stars you have sent in and finding out what you think makes your child special. We have some very special children in Foundation! We have also continued our learning about minibeasts and making our own minibeasts out of playdough. It is amazing to watch the changes taking place with our  caterpillars - they are getting bigger and bigger by the day! We have also been exploring pattern in maths and creating our own snail spiral art work inspired by the work of Henri Matisse. Next week, we will change your child's reading book at some point during the week. Please ensure they have both their books in their book bag every day so they are ready to change them when asked. Another slight change (just for next week!) is that we will be doing PE on Thursday morning instead of Wednesday afternoon. You may have noticed some changes in the Early Years Garden. The ground between the raised bedding has been dug over by some of our amazing parents and grandparents and will be ready to receive some wildflower seeds soon. Watch this space! 

Welcome Mrs Hardy!

Week beginning 15.4.24

Mrs Hardy has made an excellent start with us as our new Foundation Stage lead. She has enjoyed getting to know all the children and has some exciting things planned over the next few weeks. This term is all about minibeasts and we found a few minibeasts hiding in the garden this week while we were playing. We have enjoyed hearing the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar which will be our focus text this half term. On Friday, we welcome some very exciting visitors to our classrooms who will be staying with us a few weeks. At the moment they are very small, hairy minibeasts but in a few weeks we hope to watch them become beautiful butterflies!  The children were brilliant at changing for PE - thank you for preparing them so well! Their PE kits will stay in school until May half term. On Monday your child will be bringing a star home and asking you what makes them special. Please return these to school by Thursday 25th April. As you know we will love junk modelling in Reception and are in need of a regular supply of cardboard boxes - do save any you get and bring them into school for us to reuse! Lastly you will have seen the message on the newsletter regarding the Early Years Garden. We managed to secure a £500 grant from Tescos (thanks for collecting all those tokens!) and are now looking to bring the garden into being! If you can lend a hand or are interested in being involved, please let us know by adding your details to this form. Thank you for your ongoing support!

Goodbye Miss Crabtree and Miss Fairbrother

Week beginning 25.3.24

This week we have had an eggs-citing time rolling eggs and taking part in the Friends of Woodthorpe Easter egg decorating competition. Our wellbeing day was lots of fun too and we made some fantastic pictures which will be displayed along the school driveway fence soon for you to admire! We have also said goodbye to Miss Crabtree and Miss Fairbrother. They write "Thank you so much for the hamper of goodies. We were blown away by your generosity and thoughtfulness. It has been a pleasure to teach your amazing children. Thank you for your ongoing support and for your incredibly kind gifts. We look forward to treating ourselves soon." When we return after Easter, please send your children with a PE kit by Wednesday of the first week back as they will be getting changed in school for PE. Please also make sure all clothes are clearly named (PE kit and school uniform). Have a great Easter break.

Model Woodthorpe! 

Week beginning 18.4.24

What a busy week! We enjoyed our visit to St Mark's Church where we used our senses to discover more about this special place. Thank you to those of you who helped us on the visit. We have also been looking for signs of Spring this week and spotted lots of things beginning to bloom. Later in the week, we enjoyed the school disco kindly organised by Friends of Woodthorpe. Thank you for sending photos of your houses - we have loved looking at them in class and talking about where we live. Thank you too for coming into school to help us create our own model Woodthorpe! We had so much fun creating with you. Time for a rest now! Next week we have our wellbeing day on Thursday - please send children to school in PE kits this day.

Staying safe! 

Week beginning 11.3.24

We have spent some time this week thinking about how we can stay safe when crossing roads and in our own home. We know we have to find a safe place to cross the road and then stop, look and listen before and while we cross. Kat from our local fire and rescue service came into school and shared how we can stay safe if we see a fire. We know to call 999 and ask for the fire service. We also know what to do if our clothes catch fire - stop, drop and roll. At home, we are going to look for our smoke alarms which need testing every week! At the end of her visit we got to try some fire fighter clothes on!

World Book Day! 

Week beginning 4.3.24

This week we have been thinking about houses long ago, exploring what they looked like, what they were made from and what might have been used inside them. In RE, we have continued to learn about special places. Thank you for sending in photos of your child's special place - they were able to talk about their favourite place and explained what made them special. We also loved dressing up as book characters and sharing our favourite stories on World Book Day.  

Houses around the world!

Week beginning 26.2.24

Thank you so much for sending your photos of houses around the world. We enjoyed looking at them in class and talking about how they are similar/different from houses here. Our writing is getting better and better. This week we have loved using words to describe the wolf from the story of The Three Little Pigs when writing Wanted posters. We have also begun to 'chit' potatoes this week - we will observe them closely before planting them in a few weeks. If you would like to upload photos of your child's special place to support our learning in RE, please do so before Wednesday 6th March using this link. Thank you!

Welcome back!

Week beginning 19.2.24

It's been lovely to welcome the children back into school after half term. We have enjoyed hearing the story of The Three Little Pigs and becoming familiar with the main characters in the story. As part of our exploration of the story we rose to the challenge of making the strongest house in small teams! We also investigated which objects would move with a 'huff and a puff' and which objects would move with a hairdryer!

Lots of visitors this week!

Week beginning 5.2.24

The children had a fantastic morning this week when the ladies from Asda came into school to make pizzas with them. The children carefully spread passata on the pizza bases, chopped mushrooms and added other toppings. The best bit was getting to eat the delicious finished pizzas later in the day!

This week the children have also been learning about Chinese New Year and we were very lucky when Mr Lau came into to speak to us. Mr Lau told us all about how he and his family celebrate Chinese New Year and how this year is the Year of the Dragon. Thank you Mr Lau, we learnt a lot. 

Wishing you all a very happy half term holiday.

The Reception Team

What a Busy Week!

Week beginning: 29.1.24

We began the week with a visit to our local Sainsbury's Supermarket, thank you to all our parent helpers who came along and joined us. The story of Supertato, which we have been reading in class this term is set in a supermarket and so we enjoyed looking closely at the fruit and vegetable section, to see if we could spot Supertato and his friends. We also used our maths money skills to help us to buy some vegetables. Later in the week we made the vegetables into a delicious soup, we enjoyed tasting.

Thank you to all of our parents who came along and supported our story telling afternoon. We hope that you enjoyed yourselves and thank you for contributing ideas with your child, for creating a fantastic 5 Sentence Story about a green dragon and a magic potion. The link to the 5 sentence story can be found below - have fun creating stories at home together! The children also really enjoyed performing their retelling of Supertato to you and we are so proud of how well they have done at remembering all the words and actions. Our Supertato story map is included below if your children want to retell the story at home. Thank you also for supporting the book fair, which is being held before and after school, until Monday 5th of February.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Reception Team

We Love Telling Stories!

Week beginning 22.1.24

This week we have used our sense of taste to describe limes, crisps and raisins. We have also been exploring different ways to free Supertato from the ice! We have loved creating and telling our own 5 sentence stories too. We have used our Resourceful Learning Power, imaginations and the story boxes in the classroom to help us to invent our stories. We created lots of fantastic stories featuring different characters, settings and objects. Once we had practised them, we have enjoyed sharing them with our friends. Over the last couple of weeks we have also been busy practising retelling the story of Supertato and we look forward to sharing the story with you as part of our Story Telling afternoon on Thursday 1st February. 

Looking forward to seeing you then.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Reception Team

Super Senses

Week beginning 15.1.24

This week the children have been finding out about the world around them using their different senses. They enjoyed tasting different juices and seeing if they could identify the different ones only by taste. The children have also enjoyed using their different senses especially when they were exploring the effects of the cold weather. 

Your child has taken home a book mark this week with some of the recently taught tricky words on them. Please support your child in reading them by sight at home. Many thanks for your continued support.

Have a lovely weekend. 

The Reception Team

Supertato to the Rescue!

Week beginning 8.1.24

What a busy first full week back in school we have had! We have been focusing on families and finding out about all the different types of families there are. Thank you for sending in the photos of your child's family, the children really enjoyed describing who was in their family to their friends. We also had a lovely visit from Luna in Class 2's mummy, who introduced us to her baby Ezra and talked to us all about looking after a baby.

Thank you also for sending different vegetables into school. We discovered the Evil Pea had been very mischievous and captured some of our vegetables, so we made wanted posters to help find him. We also wrote to Supertato asking him to help us. Thankfully he came to the rescue and helped free our vegetables and luckily Mrs Bowler found the Evil Pea hiding in the school kitchen! The children really enjoyed using their different senses to explore the taste, smell, look and texture of the different vegetables.

Welcome back!

Week beginning 1.1.24

Happy New Year! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and enjoyed the break. Thank you for all your kind wishes, cards and gifts.  The children have returned to school with their excellent learning behaviours. Over the last few days, we have enjoyed sharing photos of our families with the class, harvested our potatoes and used cubes to measure objects in the classroom. Thank you for collecting Tesco tokens on our behalf. We are looking to develop the wildlife area with the funding we receive in February. If you'd like to get involved, please let us know here. Thanks for your ongoing support.

Christmas time

Week beginning 18.12.23

We are thoroughly enjoying our final week of school before Christmas. We have been taking our turns to empty the Christmas card post box - the Woodthorpe elves did a wonderful job of making sure all the cards found their way to their rightful homes. We have been finishing off our Christmas cards, calendars and decorations, and we are very excited for our party day on Thursday! 

We would like to say a huge thank you to all the children for their hard work this term, and to all the parents and carers for your support throughout the term. We hope you have a wonderful Christmas with your families, and look forward to seeing you again in 2024.

Wellbeing 

Week beginning 11.12.23

We have had lots of fun this week on our wellbeing days. We enjoyed sports sessions with Next Level Sports, especially the Christmassy orienteering activity. We did some super Christmassy crafts - results will be coming home next week! We also had a class challenge to make a Christmassy scene to be displayed in school, which are also looking wonderful.

Nativity Superstars

Week beginning 4.12.23

It was wonderful to welcome all of you to our F2 nativity on Tuesday. We are sure you will agree that the children looked great, sang and acted beautifully and showed such wonderful bravery, confidence and teamwork. Thank you so much for all your support with  helping the children to learn their songs and words, and with providing the costumes. We are looking forward to lots of festive fun during the rest of the week with Christmas lunch on Thursday and the Christmas fair on Friday - thank you so much for all your donations towards this.

Super Readers

Week beginning 27.11.23

We have been doing lots of super reading this week. We have been practising our Little Red Hen stories and changing the story in our class storytelling. We have also been working really hard at our phonics and have been practising our digraphs nk, ng, sh, ch, th and qu in our reading and writing. The children are getting really good at their digraphs and become very excited when they spot them in words we are reading. Thank you so much for all your help at home with reading, it makes such a difference and we are so proud of all the children's progress in reading.

Wollaton Hall 

Week beginning 20.11.23

We had a wonderful time on our trip to Wollaton Hall this week. The children's behaviour was fantastic throughout the trip, we were so proud of them. They enjoyed a nature walk looking at the different types of trees and their leaves, and went on a leaf hunt, finding such beautiful shapes and colours. We learnt about how the Tudors celebrated Christmas and made a pomander. We hope you are enjoying them at home! Thank you to all the parents who helped us on the day, we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did! 

Little Red Hen and Nativity superstars

Week beginning 13.11.23

It is another busy week in classes 1 and 2. We are working hard at learning the story of the Little Red Hen with actions. It has been great to see the children using such wonderful expressive voices in their storytelling - all the hard work with their reading practice books is clearly paying off.  Barney, an assistance dog visited us during the week and we learnt more about how dogs help people - unlike the dog in the Little Red Hen story! Lots of us chose to make split pin windmills during our morning focus learning. It was a bit tricky pushing the pins through and then splitting them, but the children showed great resilience and reciprocity. We were supposed to be making outdoor art work using leaves and twigs, but storm Debi had other ideas and we made some brilliant dens to shelter in! Again the children showed brilliant reciprocity and resourcefulness. Hopefully we can manage to create our art work later in the week! We loved the school disco ran by the Friends of Woodthorpe and are looking forward to our visit to Wollaton Hall next week - please remember to send your child in suitable clothing for the weather! 

Welcome back

Week beginning 6.11.23

It has been a busy first week back in classes 1 and 2. It has been wonderful to see the children coming back full of energy, with smiles on their faces, ready for a busy half term. We hope you had a great break with your families. Thank you to all the children who brought in their firework models, we have loved having them up in the classrooms this week.

This week we have started looking at our new story, The Little Red Hen. We were introduced to the main characters: the shy cat; the rat who is in a rush and the lively dog. We used drama to explore their movements: tiptoeing; scurrying and bounding. We had lots of fun planting our seeds and can't wait to see what they grow into.

We have also started learning the songs for our nativity play, and the children have already amazed us with their lovely singing and ability to learn actions at the same time. Make sure you have Tuesday 5th December in your diary, it's going to be fantastic!

Happy holidays!

Week beginning 16.10.23

What a busy half term we've had! Your children have used all their amazing learning powers over the past 6 weeks and have made a great start to their time at Woodthorpe Infant School. It was lovely to share some of their progress with you at parents evening.  We have enjoyed our recent wellbeing days in class 1 and 2 where we have spent time doing things that make us feel happy. We painted our class stone to go on our pebble pathway and enjoyed being active, taking part in different physical challenges. We hope you all have a wonderful break over half term and enjoy spending time with your superstars!

We've been on a bear hunt!

Week beginning 9.10.23

We had a great time this week on our local walk, hunting for bears! Each bear was located by something interesting in our local area. We named the feature and used words to describe where the bear was in relation to the feature. We had to look high up for the bear that was hiding above the tunnel! We have also explored and described different settings our for our bear hunt story, developing new vocabulary and changing our story accordingly. In maths we have been exploring different representations of the numbers 1 and 2 and have enjoyed noticing numbers in our environment. Thank you for all your support with your child's reading. They are working so hard - we are super proud of them all!

Stay and play!

Week beginning 2.10.23

It was so lovely to welcome you all into school this week for our stay and play session. We hope you enjoyed seeing your child in their school environment. Thanks to some willing parent volunteers, our sandpit is now full of sand and we are looking forward to seeing the children enjoy learning in this area. We were excited to notice changes to the potatoes we planted in our raised bed a few weeks ago - they are beginning to sprout! During the week we have been practising holding our pencil with the correct pencil grip. Here is a fun song that you might like to use at home to support your child's pencil grip.  We have also been applying our knowledge of 3D shapes when describing and building towers. Thank you for collecting lots of cardboard tubes - we now have enough. However, if you, or someone you know, enjoys knitting and would like to create some characters to support our texts this year, please get in touch! We are looking forward to our local area walk on Thursday to Thackerays Lane Recreation Ground. Please ensure your child has appropriate clothing and footwear for the terrain and weather!

A visit by a bear!

Week beginning 25.9.23

This week we have been visited by 'bear'! This was a hook into our talk for writing text 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. We have told the story using our story map and have started to learn it off by heart using actions to help us.  We have also been working outside to create a 'cave' for our bear! In maths we have been busy exploring 3D shape, identifying and naming cylinders, cubes, cuboids and spheres. We have also started reading in school this week and have been so impressed with the children's resilience! You will now have a sharing book and a reading book in your child's reading folder. Please take time to share these with your child, write in their reading diary and return the books on Monday. It will help us if the books are ready to hand over when you come into the classroom. We need the reading practice book inside the green diary to go in one box and the sharing book into another! Your child may come home with a green band on - do ask them what is on the band. It will be something they are trying hard to remember.  Thank you for your support with PE kit. Children are now coming to school in their PE kit every Wednesday instead of changing in school. If you missed the curriculum evening, the link to the presentation is here. We are looking forward to welcoming you into school on Tuesday at 2.30pm for our stay and play session. Lastly, on Sunday 1st October, do join Mrs Burton in the Early Years Garden from 1.45pm- all welcome!

Special stories...

Week beginning 18.9.23

This week we have sung 'Five Little Men in a Flying Saucer' in our maths lessons - ask us to sing it to you! We used counters to represent the spacemen and moved them as we sung. On Friday, we enjoyed sharing our special stories. We talked about how we respect books - especially those that are special.  Potatoes have also been planted in our outdoor area - we will watch and see what happens over the next few months. We have also enjoyed counting and pattern making outside. Thank you so much for bringing in lots of cardboard tubes - we will be making our telescopes soon!  We are looking forward to seeing you on Monday at 6pm for our curriculum evening presentation where we will share what your child will learn whilst they are with us in Reception and how you can best support them.

Super learning powers!

Week beginning 11.9.23

The children have settled into school life brilliantly - thank you for all your support with this! This week we have spent time getting to know each other and school routines. We have enjoyed exploring the classroom and our outdoor areas.  Over the week, we have been finding out about our school learning powers - Reciprocity, Resilience, Resourcefulness, Respect and Reflectiveness. Thank you for all your amazing photos! Your child will have received a sharing book this week. This is a book for you to read to your child and enjoy together. Please return this book on Monday.  Reading books will be sent home in a few weeks time. 

Could you make sure your child has appropriate clothing every day please. It is important they bring a coat with them every day as we will be going outside in all weathers! Also, please make sure all jumpers and cardigans are named and return any if you find your child has taken the wrong one home!  Over the next few weeks we will be making telescopes with the children. Please collect any cardboard tubes such as toilet roll inners and pass to your child's teacher as you get them! Next Friday (22nd Sep) we will be thinking about special books and have invited your child to bring in their special book. Please make sure the book is clearly marked with your child's name. Thank you!