Please see the photo above of the way we are beginning to prepare the classroom; this may help with the difficult decision as to whether to send your children back to school when we re-open.

Welcome to Reception.

In order to help parents to continue their children’s education as effectively as possible and to open channels of communication between home and school we are setting up class email addresses for each teacher. The address for your class is reception@hollinsgrundy.com.

As you are aware, teachers are posting learning tasks and links to educational websites on their class pages on a weekly basis. The email addresses can be used to ask teachers questions about the weekly tasks and about how to teach certain aspects of the curriculum. Don’t worry about asking questions that may seem daft; it’s much better to ask than to struggle on or to avoid certain subjects or topics.

I would not expect that there would be more than one or two emails per child per week. Please limit your emails to questions about children’s learning, and the tasks which have been posted each week and don’t return completed worksheets for marking. Teachers will not be responding with additional tasks for individual children.

Many thanks, Mr Waddington

Update Monday 25th May

Hello everyone, here we are at half term!

I hope you are all keeping safe and looking after each other.

Many thanks for all your emails, it is lovely to see the children happy and completing some of the activities available.

This week would be half term, so no new learning activities will be set for your children. I will leave last weeks learning tasks on if you need them. I will be in school next week from Tuesday onwards and will try to contact all of you for a chat and a catch up. As you can see I have been getting the classroom ready for the safe return of your children, it will be a different environment than the one they are used to.

To engage my own children this week, we will be collecting and making a memory box. We are going to decorate a box, print off some photographs and put together a collection of all the things related to this extremely unusual situation.

In the McCrory box will be things like:

• Frequently said phrases, “we need more milk.”
• A pack of cards as we have been playing card games in the evenings
• Face masks
• Lock down birthday cards
• Online Quiz nights
• Zooming with family and friends

Bee week. In the topic packs available to download I’ve added some fact cards about bees and here are some links to an animated story about bees and a video of some information about bees. One of the activities ask you to make wings with laminated sheets, please use whatever you have available at home, or if you are feeling creative make your own bee.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories/melody-the-lost-bee

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/bp-all-about-bees

I’m sure a few parents will be pleased to hear that I am changing the handwriting practice to pencil control sheets. Please continue to work with your child when writing to follow the correct letter formation when possible.

As something different I added some tricky word activities this week, one of the activities is to make the word with playdoh, if you don’t have any don’t worry, colour the word instead.

Stay safe everyone and we all hope to see you all soon.

Best wishes from all the Reception class staff

Mrs McCrory, Mrs Abbotts, Mrs Sellers, Mrs Snowden and Miss Litherland.

If you need extra support to teach phonics there are videos available here

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAxW1XT0iEJo0TYlRfn6rYQhttps://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/find-out-more/parents/

For extra support to teach handwriting please use this website

https://www.teachhandwriting.co.uk/

To access reading books and activities set, please set up a parents account on this website and it will give you access to eBooks for reading activities.

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/

If you need anything extra to help with your child’s learning then use this website with the code UKTWINKLHELPS

https://www.twinkl.co.uk/