At North Somercotes CE Primary School, we take great pride in our caring, creative, and happy environment, where every child is valued equally and supported to reach their full potential. Our class is a kind, friendly, hard-working—and generally amazing—group of learners!

Our class is led by Mrs. Abualzulof, with the wonderful support of our teaching assistants, Mrs. Musgrove and Miss Arnold.

Through play-based learning and the support of attentive adults, the children are encouraged to explore, discover, and develop a wide range of skills and concepts. They are natural problem-solvers, often revisiting and building on their own ideas—and they’re fantastic at coming up with creative new ways to approach tasks!

In addition to child-initiated learning, the children take part in adult-directed activities, where we introduce new skills, reinforce knowledge, or explore exciting topics together. Our goal is to create a stimulating, engaging curriculum that nurtures curiosity and a lifelong love of learning. We believe that fostering this mindset in the Foundation Stage sets the tone for a positive and successful school journey ahead.

EYFS Curriculum

Your child will be learning skills, acquiring new knowledge and demonstrating their understanding through seven areas of Learning and Development. The three prime areas are:

• Communication and language;
• Physical development;
• Personal, social and emotional development.

These prime areas are most essential for your child’s healthy development and future learning. As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in four specific areas. These are:

• Literacy;
• Mathematics;
• Understanding the World;
• Expressive Arts & Design.

These seven areas together are used to plan your child’s learning and activities in Reception. Children in the EYFS learn by creative and critical thinking, by playing, exploring & being active - both indoors and outside. Assessments are made throughout the year & are based on observations and knowledge of the whole child.  Term 1 is all about getting to know each other.  During this half term, staff will observe and work with your child making judgements regarding the best way to engage them and take their learning forward.

LIBRARY BOOKS

This term the children will enjoy taking home books chosen from our class library.This is a ‘free choice’ book to encourage reading for pleasure to ensure that children have access to a rich and balanced reading diet. It will be entirely up to the children which book they choose and we would expect them to read their library book with an adult at home. This book will include high quality vocabulary for children to be exposed to. It is really important that children have opportunities to listen to high quality texts that are modelled by adults. This text will create discussion around language, vocabulary and related experiences

The children will be able to change their library books as often as they wish as long as they wish at the beginning of the day.

At North Somercotes CE Primary we follow the Monster Phonics scheme to support the teaching of early reading.

What is Phonics?
The 26 letters of the alphabet and combinations of these letters make 44 speech
sounds in English. The 44 sounds (phonemes) are spelt by 144 different letter
combinations (graphemes). For example, the sound O is spelt 6 different ways: o
(no), o-e (home), oa (boat), ow (snow), oe (toe) and ou (though).
 

What is Monster Phonics?
Monster Phonics makes learning to read and spell through phonics easier, by
categorising the 44 sounds into 10 categories and each of these 10 categories are
represented by a Monster.  Each Monster is a different colour, and this colour
represents that way of spelling the sound.  This makes learning to read and spell
much easier and more fun.

Why does Monster Phonics improve learning?
The child learns through the assignment of colour and the linkage of the sound, as
well as seeing the colour, creating more ways of remembering the spelling.
The games, songs and activities within the programme continuously reflect this way
of learning, so that structure is constantly seen, heard and experienced by your child.
This consistency is critical in ensuring that a complicated language is learnt in the
most simplistic way. 

High-frequency words are learnt much faster with Monster Phonics. These words
make up 65% of the words used in reading.

1. Once colour-coded, high-frequency words can be taught in easy to learn sets
of similar words. This significantly improves spelling.

2. With colour-coding non-decodable words become decodable. Children are no
longer told that words like ‘they’ and ‘my’ are tricky as they can be decoded.

To find out more about how Monster Phonics works visit https://monsterphonics.com/how-it-works/

Independent Reading Books

In Reception initially the children will be taking home a picture book. Sharing wordless books is a terrific way to build important literacy skills, including listening skills, vocabulary, comprehension — and an increased awareness of how stories are "built," as the storyteller often uses a beginning, middle, end format.

The Monster Phonics Reading Scheme

When the children are ready they will be reading Monster Phonics books in groups 3 times a week. They will then take their book home for additional practice. A brief explanation of how to follow the activities is included in the books. Children will be able to feel confident about reading and will be able to read this book with fluency and speed. They will have a good understanding of this book and will be able to talk about it to an adult.

In the Reception Monster Phonics books there are two pieces of text: one in a larger font and, at the bottom, a more detailed text in a smaller font. The child only has to read the large text. The smaller text is for the adult to read to provide the children with context and a story to match what they have read. Repeat reading helps familiarise words and phrases and improves the speed at which they decode words.

For more information on how to support the reading of Monster Phonics books at home please go to: https://monsterphonics.com/guide-to-reading-monster-phonics-books/

PE

On a Wednesday we have JB Sports coaches in school to teach our PE lesson; on these days we need to come to school in our PE kit.

PE kit should be:

• Plain white t-shirt
• Black/navy shorts.
• Trainers or Plimsolls can be worn for PE lessons.
• Black/Navy tracksuit bottoms for colder weather/outdoor PE.
• Black/Navy tracksuit top for colder weather/outdoor PE.
• No Football/Sports shirts

MAGICAL ME

Magical Me happens every Thursday. This is a special opportunity for the children to bring in one item of interest, inside their bag, to share and talk about with friends and staff. This activity promotes the development of speaking and listening skills, one of the Prime Areas of the EYFS Curriculum. 

Our Curriculum 

Summer II

This term we will be shining a light on Mahatma Gandhi, a leader who used peaceful methods to help India become independent from Britain. Gandhi's actions inspired many other people to fight for their rights peacefully, both in India and around the world. 

HOMEWORK 

We encourage all children to read for at least 10 minutes a day. This will help them to put their fluency into practice, one of the cornerstones to great reading!

Below you will find a list of additonal challenges that your child may wish to complete at home. Enjoy!