Beech Grove Primary School
Summer Term 2026
Head Teacher’s Message
Happy sun shine days everyone and welcome to summer term 2026. Let’s hope the wet weather is behind us and that we can start to enjoy the Great British Summer. (He says with his fingers crossed!)
On behalf of the staff, I would like to wish everyone a happy return after the Easter break and hope that summer term 2026 is a good one for our whole school community.
As Head teacher of your school, I continue to be so proud of all of the children and the way they have started back since returning in September 2025. Their resilience, adaptability and hardworking attitudes to learning remain outstanding. It is such a pleasure to see the children care so much and take pride in all of their work and the school environment.
They are certainly living up to the schools “NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR QUALITIES” that we have of:
- Respect
- Tolerance
- Kindness
Along with our 5 Golden Rules. The “Next Door Neighbour Qualities” is something that is really important to our school and encourages everyone to be a good citizen within our school and wider community. To see the children demonstrating all of those essential ‘Next Door Neighbour Qualities’ on a daily basis is brilliant to see and brightens up my day.
The children’s corridor manners and the way they conduct themselves around school is wonderful.
I also love it that so many children are eager and keen to show me their work in their books. This sense of family and belonging warms my heart. I couldn’t be any prouder of our Beech Grove Family.
This term we hope to pick up where we left off before Easter with our children achieving good progress within their core subject areas of Reading, Writing and Maths, due to the tremendous hard-working attitude of themselves and the dedicated staff team here at school.
This term we will also be hoping for some lovely summer sunshine so that children can make full use of our Secret Garden in lesson time and maybe plant some wonderful summer flowers for us all to enjoy. Especially when it comes to our summer attendance reward ice-cream and ice lolly parties!!
Our teachers have lots of interesting activities and trips planned for this term and hope that you will enjoy hearing what children have been working on at consultation meetings/phone conversations, and will support them with their homework and reading outside of school.
AS ALWAYS Please, please, please x10000 keep encouraging your child to read at home. Reading is the key to unlocking the world!
We also hope that every effort is made by you for every child to attend school regularly. It is so important for your child’s development. We can’t stress this enough. A massive WELL DONE to all the children who achieved 95% and above attendance for the Spring Term. The children absolutely love it when they know they are coming to “Mr Dixon’s attendance party” for goodies, prizes and dancing etc because of their good attendance levels. Please do all that you can to ensure your child is part of the Summer Term attendance party’s celebrations. 95% and above attendance for the full term will get you that golden ticket to the party.
This term its ice cream treats and ice lollies in the secret garden. Please help your child achieve this reward. Not forgetting also, the BIG attendance prize where we have scooters (all with helmets to go with them), seasonal family hampers, amazon vouchers and lots more to give away in our attendance prize draw.
Here’s to a really positive Summer term!
John Dixon
Our work for this term
(The EYFS Curriculum is made up of 7 areas of development)
1. English
Our main focus in Nursery is developing good Speaking and Listening Skills and fostering Early Reading and Writing Skills.
SPEAKING AND LISTENING – The children will engage in a wide range of play-based activities – supported by adults to encourage conversation skills and extend the children’s vocabulary. We will develop good listening skills during carpet time with a range of stories, rhymes, songs and listening games. We will be having a role play castle area (Summer 1) and then a Dining Hall transition area (Summer 2) to support the transition of our older children to Reception.
READING – The very first step for learning to read is to develop a love of books. So we will share super stories every day. We share a story during whole class carpet time. We also read books in small groups and to individual children in the story corner throughout the day. We often read the same books over and over so that the children become familiar with them. The children will start having favourite stories and ask for them. They may begin to recite the stories by themselves. We will also encourage the children to look at books by themselves so that they become familiar with handling books – holding them the right way up and turning the pages one at a time going left to right – these are all early reading skills that the children need to learn. We will also begin to do some story telling of our own using props and puppets. This term our older children will be starting to learn some Read Write Inc sounds ready for Reception.
WRITING – Early writing begins with MARK MAKING. The children will eventually learn how to hold a pencil properly and to make a variety of pre-writing marks – lines, circles and crosses. Before this happens, the children need to build up strength in their hand and finger muscles. We will be doing lots of fine motor exercises- dough disco, squeezing stress balls, pinching pegs, threading. We will also be doing lots of gross motor exercises to build our core strength to prepare us to write- stretch bands, space hoppers, trampolines etc. We will be making marks in a variety of materials- glitter, shaving foam, paint. We will be practising our scissor skills to cut and our co-ordination to do buttons and zips. Our older children will also be practising writing the first initial of their names and then move on to their first names with adult support along with some of our Read Write Inc sounds.
2. Maths
This term our older children will be focussing on being able to show the correct amount of fingers for a given number, learning to recognise numbers 1-5 and understanding that when we count the last number tells us how many altogether (cardinal principle) We will be learning numbers 1-5 using our Ten Town Maths programme.
This term our younger children will be focussing on singing finger rhymes with numbers such as “1,2,3,4,5 once I caught a fish alive” and “5 little ducks.” We will be starting to count verbally and talking about groups of objects using vocabulary such as lots, more and the same.
3. Topic
Our topic for Summer 1 is ‘Do dragons exist?’ – We will be looking at whether dragons exist in real life and comparing them to real life reptiles. We will be reading lots of dragon stories and learning about St George. At the end of the topic we will be having a castle banquet so the children will be making their own cups and plates over the half term.
For Summer 2 our topic is “How does that building stay up?” We will be going on a walk into the local area to visit the building site on Keith Road and look at how the houses are being built. We will be experimenting with different materials and talking about what we would use to build things. We will be looking at the story of the Three Little Pigs and making some pigs houses out of different materials, we will then see if they can stay up when the wolf comes (a hairdryer!)
4. Safeguarding (What we are teaching children to help them keep safe)
We will be talking to the children about road safety now that the nights are getting lighter. We will also be talking about sun safety and how we can be safe in the warmer weather.
Dates for your Diary
Spring Term: Monday 20th April 2026 – Tuesday 21st July 2026
Half Term: Monday 25th May 2026 – Friday 29th May 2026
May Day: Monday 4th May 2026
Friday 22nd May 2026 – Castle Banquet to end our “Do dragons exist?” topic
Summer 2 dates to be confirmed