Reception w/b 16th January
Date: 20th Jan 2023 @ 8:34pm
We have just loved Week 3 of the Spring term in Reception and it has been a delight to see the children so enthused about all aspects of their learning.
The children have all been working hard within their phonics sessions to consolidate the Set 1 special friends sounds. It is fantastic to see children now applying this knowledge of special friends within their writing for our weekly literacy tasks. From next week, we will be moving around our phonics teachers; whilst the groups will remain the same, they will have a different adult teaching them. This is a great way to ensure that the children to have chance to work with a different teacher, all of whom are Read Write Inc. trained and understand how to best support each group. These adults will then remain the same for the foreseeable future to ensure both children and teachers have a good chunk of time to work together and that wonderful progress continues.
Next week, we will also begin a timetabled guided reading session. The children will rotate through a carousel of five activities (one for each day) of: 2 x guided reading stations, 1 x handwriting station, a fine motor activity station and a phonics game station. We anticipate that the children will thoroughly enjoy this rotation of activities and we look forward to sharing our reading/handwriting progress with you at home.
In our maths sessions, we have been consolidating our understanding of the composition of 5. Composing and decomposing numbers involves the children investigating part–part–whole relations, e.g. seeing that 5 can be made of 3 and 2. We have focused on the nursery rhyme ‘Five Little Speckled Frogs’ to help deepen our understanding of a whole’ being made up of smaller parts through practical experience, in this case moving frogs from a log to a pool. Our number of the week has been number 4. We enjoyed using playdough to model animals from the Chinese Zodiac story and using counting sticks to add 4 legs. We worked on our 4 formation, using the rhyme: down and over, down once more. That’s the way to make a 4!
Naughty Bus has continued to cause mischief this week and has now explored the whole school! On Monday, Mrs Sant came down to our classroom to alert us to the fact that teachers throughout school were complaining about the mess he was leaving behind so we were asked to investigate. In small groups, we visited various areas of school to identify chaos caused by Naughty Bus. Using our magnifying glasses, we spied coats on the floor, books and pens tipped out of containers, stools that had been knocked over, wellies that had been stolen and Naughty Bus had even left a message on the Year 3 cupboards! Therefore, on Tuesday, a ‘police officer’ visited us to gather information. He said that he had received various reports from the school and surrounding community of the chaos that Naughty Bus was causing. We certainly had lots to tell him! He asked us to write evidence reports based on our investigation around school. This was certainly a motivating hook for our writing this week. We have continued to focus on the use of finger spaces and full stops; correct letter formation; letters sitting on the line; use of phonics and we are beginning to introduce the concept of a capital letter to start a sentence. Finally, we worked as a class to compile a bank of interesting adjectives to describe Naughty Bus to make it easier for the police to catch their suspect. We continued to look for evidence of Naughty Bus in Forest School, in addition to exploring the frost.
On Sunday, it will be Lunar New Year; this celebration has inspired much of our learning this week. We know that Lunar New Year is celebrated in many countries in different ways but we focused particularly on Chinese New Year traditions. It was interesting to learn that Lunar New Year is always in January or February but the date changes each year because it follows a very old calendar which is linked to the phases of the Moon. We learnt about traditions such as: cleaning houses to sweep away bad luck; decorating with/wearing red as it is thought to be a lucky colour; having lucky fruits including mandarins, apples and bananas; children being given red envelopes full of money or sweets; dragon and lion dancing in the streets, often accompanied by fireworks. You may find these CBeebies links of interest: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/chinese-new-year https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/curations/chinese-lunar-new-year . We were then introduced to the story of the Chinese Zodiac Race and enjoyed acting it out with puppets. Throughout the week, we have engaged with related provision activities such as: using chopsticks to transfer pom poms to pots numbered with Mandarin numbers; using playdough to make the animals from the Zodiac race; using Numicon shapes to make dragons; writing Mandarin numbers in various mediums; making lanterns, dancing dragons, rattle drums and Chinese fans. Today, all of the children were given a red envelope containing a gold chocolate coin! We each also enjoyed a fortune cookie. To end our day, we ventured outside to perform lion and dragon dances; during the dances we made lots of noise with our drums!
There was great excitement this week when we arrived in school on Wednesday and Thursday to a blanket of snow. As the photos show, the children thoroughly enjoyed exploring the snowy environment and loved perfecting their skills when rolling snow to make snowmen.
Due to the snow, the hall was in use on Thursday afternoon so we enjoyed some indoor warm up games and gymnastic shapes with Mrs Edwards before another play in the snow. Mrs Edwards also led our second Friendship Terrace session which was entitled, ‘Blurt Out Belinda’. The friendship blocker that Belinda faced was: saying things without thinking of the other person’s feelings. The friendship builder that we therefore focused on was: being aware of friends’ feelings and keeping some things in your ‘inside voice’.
Our My Happy Mind ‘Appreciate’ focus has continued and, this week, we worked together to create a thankfulness tree. Suggestions of people/places/activities we are thankful for included: siblings because they share with us; dogs because they play with us; friends because they care for us; the beach because we love dancing in the waves; home because my family are there; the park. We worked together to create a beautiful prayer of thankfulness.
Wow, what a busy week! We have had ever so much fun and are looking forward to the activities that next week will bring. I hope that it is a warm, cosy and restful weekend for you all and I look forward to seeing you all on Monday.
With so many thanks for your wonderful support,
Miss Witham
