Firstly, we would like to welcome you and your child to Baddow Hall Infant School. We feel privileged to be part of your child’s journey through education. Ensuring your child has a positive start to school is our main focus and is why we spend the first half term getting to know your child.
Our topic this half term is ‘Marvellous Me’ and our focus is exactly that. We will start off by settling your child into school, focusing on friendships and getting your child used to the setting and the routines of school. From this, we will build upon name recognition, number recognition and counting skills. This will provide us with an exact baseline of your child’s current abilities and we can ensure that our early years planning caters for developing your child’s skills further.
As well as getting to know your child, a big part of this half term is spent getting your child to engage in a wide variety of activities, both in and outside the classroom. These activities will be developing a range of skills in different ways such as:
- Number understanding through practical activities
- Gross and fine motor skill activities to build up strength ready for using a pencil to write
- Language and communication skills through games and role play
- Social skills through games, role play and collaborative play
- Imaginative and creative skills through construction, art and design and role play
As well as many other important skills…
Literacy Focus:
This half term, our focus is getting your child to recognise their name and to develop their pencil control and grip through fine motor activities. For our reading focus, we will be working on Phase 1 and 2 phonics.
This half term, our focus will be on developing an understanding of maths, in particular numbers to 5. We will look at each number in detail, including representing numbers, the composition of numbers and their place value. We will also focus on carefully counting objects, actions and sounds.
- Ensure all school clothes are clearly labelled
- Bring your child’s water bottle and book bag to school everyday
- Make sure you have registered your child for school milk
- Pre-order school dinners for the half term
- Read lots of stories together
- Sing different nursery rhymes together
- Recognise numbers in your environment
- Count anything and everything (e.g. steps, jumps, objects)
- Talk about the school day (use Tapestry and Class Dojo to support this)
Some fun Maths activities.
Free website. Lots of fun maths games.
Learn how much fun counting can be with the Numberblocks - a fun-loving group of numbers who work together to solve problems big and small.
Great, short videos to help with learning sounds, blending words and practising rhyming.
A fun phonics game. Free online and the app is currently free too. Please start at level 1: Teach Your Monster to Read - First Steps.
