Welcome Year R families!
We hope you are all settling into your new routines well, though we understand it must be a confusing time for the children. With that in mind we have created some suggested activities that you could do with your children each day whilst the schools are closed. We are posting all these activities in Tapestry (which you can access in the usual way) as it means we can tailor make the activities to your child’s own learning needs. If you have any trouble accessing Tapestry please contact the school office.
The most important thing to us is that your children are happy and enjoy their learning so please feel free to adapt the activities so they best suit your children.
Below are some resources that you might find useful to print out and use but they are by no means mandatory and can easily be made with a pen and paper!
We hope you enjoy your time together at home, please contact us via the school office or send us a message on Tapestry if we can help in any way.
Best wishes,
The Early Years Team 🙂
Number cards 0-20:
These can be printed and cut out to use. Useful for number recognition and ordering numbers.
Phonics Phase 3 sound cards:
Useful for sound recognition and playing many different phonics games which we will tell you about.
First 16 sets of keywords:
Once your child is confident recognising the keywords individually and in the text of a book please move on to the next set. It is good to practise earlier sets even if you child has moved on as they might forget them without regular practise.
Kinetic Letters – letter formation:
Kinetic letters is the new handwriting scheme we have started to use across our school. The scheme concentrates on helping children make their bodies stronger, hold their pencil correctly, form letters and improve flow and fluency.
In order to strengthen the muscles the children need to become successful writers we practise different ‘poses’ which are similar to yoga positions. They need strong cores to gain shoulder, arm, wrist, hand and finger strength in order to write easily and neatly. Your children should hopefully be able to demonstrate these to you but here is a picture reminder:
These positions can be done throughout the day – perhaps reading or watching TV in Lizard pose? Playing at a small table in Meercat?
Next, ensure your child is holding their pencil correctly. They might find this tricky at first but it is really beneficial for them in the long run to perfect it at their early writing stage. You will find a video on how to hold the pencil correctly in the link below.
At school the children have been learning how to form individual letters. Kinetic Letters introduces the children to a scared and brave monkey which teaches them which are ‘tall’ and ‘short’ letters and those which go below the line. Please see the videos in the link below.
Link to Kinetic Letter formation and pencil grip videos
Letter formation sound mat:
Park Gate Primary School 