Reception Classes – Activity Packs

Dear parents / carers, 

The children have settled into life in Reception brilliantly and it is lovely to see them engaging so well with their learning. 

We have put some activity packs in your children’s book bags this week and will be adding another next week. Under normal circumstances, we would invite you into school for a meeting in which we would go through these packs and some tips on how to support learning at home. Unfortunately, due to the restrictions in place relating to Covid-19, we are unable to do this so we thought that we’d share some information here and share some videos on Tapestry to introduce them.  

Sound Snakes Pack

The children have daily phonics lessons in which they learn to hear, use and identify different sounds as they begin to read independently. They are learning to match the letters to the sounds that they represent in isolation before using their knowledge to read words, by blending different sounds together. 

• This pack will follow your child through Reception and into Key Stage 1. Some of the later sounds will not be taught until well into Year 1 so don’t worry about ‘completing’ them all this year 
• We teach the letter sounds in a specific order in school and the order in which they appear on the snakes in the pack reflects this
• The children are informally assessed every fortnight by one of the adults in Reception and we will highlight a letter on a snake when your child knows it independently and consistently. Staff will update the snakes as they work with the children so please don’t highlight these yourself. While children may show you that they know sounds at home, it is important that they are showing this knowledge consistently and independently in school before we can make a judgement on what they know 
• Each individual letter has a picture on the back of it that has the letter as it’s initial sound. You can use these to play games or support your child in recognising the letter and the sound it represents 
• Each snake has a card to accompany it with a selection of words on it. While it is important that children know as many sounds as possible, in order to apply this knowledge and read independently, they need to be able to blend the sounds that they know together to read words. The words on the cards that accompany a snake allow the children to apply their knowledge of the letter sounds to word reading, alongside sounds that they have learnt from previous snakes. By identifying the individual sounds and reading them within words, it will allow them to practise and consolidate their knowledge of letters and sounds. This is a vital step in learning to read
• As much as possible, practise the skill of ‘blending’. This can be done by verbally segmenting a word such as “t-a-p” and asking your child to guess the word that you are sounding out 
• If you practise the sounds at home, please could you put a comment in your child’s reading log to say that they have practised. This doesn’t have to be an extended comment but by knowing that your child has practised their letters and sounds at home, it allows us to know who is having regular practise and where any other support may be necessary 

Rockets and Moons Pack

In addition to the Sound Snakes which allow the children to learn and apply the letter sounds in the order in which we teach them in school, it is important that children have a bank of high frequency words that they are familiar with and can quickly identify by sight or read using their phonics skills. By learning the words in this pack, children will have a bank of high frequency words that commonly appear in the books that they read in school and at home. Familiarity with these words will greatly support them as they learn to read with fluency. 

• As with the Sound Snakes, your child will continue to work through this pack as they move through Year 1 
• These will also be assessed every fortnight by a member of staff and words that children are reading independently and consistently will be highlighted by staff 
• The overview sheets are accompanied by word lists that can be cut up and used as flashcards to practise with at home 
• The rockets can be read phonetically. This means that children can use their knowledge of the letter sounds to segment the word into individual letter sounds before they blend them together to read the word. For example, ‘cat’ can be read as ‘c-a-t’ and children will be able to ‘hear’ the word cat when reading it
• The moons are high frequency, irregular words. These words cannot be segmented phonetically and must be learnt by sight. For example, if children attempt to sound out the word  ‘some’ by saying ‘s-o-m-e’, they won’t ‘hear’ the word. Frequent use of flashcards will really help to learn these words
• Similarly to the Sound Snakes, please put a comment in your child’s reading log to let us know that they have practised their words at home

Maths Packs

We will be adding Maths activity packs to the children’s book bags next week. By the end of Reception, children are generally expected to have a solid understanding of numbers within 20 and be able to apply their knowledge and understanding of numbers to concepts such as addition and subtraction. The packs and games within them are designed to give you some basic activities that will support the children in Maths throughout the year.

• The packs have numbers 1-20 in them which can be cut up to use as flashcards for quick recognition or to practice ordering and other number patterns
• We have also included Numicon pieces to 10. This is a resource that we use regularly in school in mathematical work as it is an effective way to show what a number represents. You can cut these up to help your children match a numeral to a quantity or to help with addition, subtraction and other mathematical concepts 
• Throughout the year, we continually revisit different concepts in Maths so that the children can embed and reinforce their knowledge of numbers. We’d encourage you to do the same with the activities in the pack so the children revisit and reinforce what they know throughout the year

As with any work completed at home, we’d recommend that you practise activities for a short time and often. We will be posting videos on Tapestry to introduce the packs and if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us through Tapestry or the school office. We’d love to see you using them at home or using them as a basis to create some imaginative and fun ways of practising your reading and maths. Please share what you can on Tapestry as we’d love to share what the children have been getting up to with their friends in school. 

Finally, thank you so much for your support since the children have joined Reception. In what has been a welcome return to school after a challenging time, it has been lovely to see the children back in school and so eager and ready to learn. 

Thank you, 

The Reception Team