Reception w/b 18th March
Date: 22nd Mar 2024 @ 3:47pm
Spring has sprung indeed and Reception are thoroughly enjoying observing and discussing seasonal changes and signs of new life. Whilst we have had some rather wet and windy weather this week, the sunny enthusiasm of the children has ensured our week has remained bright and joyous as ever.
Phonics lessons have continued with enthusiasm and success, evident in the super progress that all of the children continue to make. This week, I assessed each child’s red word knowledge and have been ever so impressed with the number of red words we can speedily recognise! On Wednesday morning, I carried out reading assessments for half of the class and aim to complete the remainder of the assessments on Monday morning. I therefore intend to keep diaries on Monday evening to stick in reading assessment information. It is always such a pleasure to complete these reading checks, celebrating each child’s hard work and observing their pride!
After a super sequence of story writing last week, this week it was time to apply our super writing skills within a non-fiction context. On Monday, Miss Jones helped us to follow and extend our current interest in frogs. First, we thought more about the meaning of ‘non-fiction’ and spent time exploring the features and structures of non-fiction books. As part of this exploration, we realised that most non-fiction books about animals have sections full of information about what the animals look like, where they live, what they eat, as well as plenty of interesting facts! We therefore planned our own writing all about frogs, exploring frog non-fiction books to find out what they look like, where they live, what they eat and some interesting facts. We added pictures to our planning sheets as reminders of what we wanted to write about within each section. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we then wrote the first two pages of our books, applying our super sentence skills as we remembered to include capital letters, full stops, finger spaces, correct letter formation and pinching of the sounds. We are looking forward to finishing our books next week.
In our maths lessons, we have continued to practise recalling the composition of numbers as doubles. This experience of investigating doubles has then helped us to begin to practically explore even and odd numbers. The Numberblocks episode, ‘Odds and Evens’ (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r2l4d/numberblocks-series-2-odds-and-evens) has been really helpful here, helping us to sort Numicon shapes and Numberblock characters (built so that they have 2 columns) into those with long, flat tops (even numbers) and those with an ‘odd one sticking up’ (odd numbers). Investigating the composition of these numbers helped us to spot the two equal columns in the even numbers. We know that two equal parts signifies a double, helping us to realise that even numbers can be composed as doubles.
In Spanish, we recapped numbers 1 – 5 (uno = 1, dos = 2, tres = 3, cuatro = 4, cinco = 5) as well as introducing numbers 6 – 10 (seis = 6, siete = 7, ocho = 8, nueve = 9, diez = 10).
On Tuesday afternoon, Miss Jones taught us all about the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Andy creates land art (sculptures with natural materials) on sites in the UK and around the world. We recognised that he uses leaves, twigs, pebbles, rocks, ice, flowers, grass and pinecones but were most surprised to discover that he also uses human hair and cow dung! The children made some very interesting observations when looking at photographs of Andy Goldsworthy’s art and could confidently explain their opinions. Feeling inspired, we headed into our Forest School session to create our own land art with natural materials.
On Thursday morning, it was the turn of Reception to visit St Oswald’s Church for our class service. We were lucky enough to walk in the best of the weather, enjoying a springtime stroll, so much so that Miss Witham forgot to take any photographs – my apologies! Reverend Sandi helped us to understand the elements of a church service, including stories, blessings, saying sorry to God, prayer, songs and the creed. Reverend Sandi also taught us how to pray using a palm cross. As we returned to school, we had unfortunately missed our hall time for PE but, luckily, we have a fantastic park next door! We therefore enjoyed plenty of exercise (and plenty of fun!) by using the park equipment.
Thursday was also World Down Syndrome Day - a celebration indeed! Many thanks to Gabriel and Arabella’s Mummy for her donation to Down Syndrome Cheshire, meaning we all enjoyed a sock biscuit. The reasoning behind the socks is that chromosomes look like socks and we know that people with Down syndrome have three copies of the 21st chromosome (this is also why we celebrate on the 21st of March!). To find out more about World Down Syndrome Day and how you can celebrate, please visit https://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/our-work/campaigning/world-down-syndrome-day/#:~:text=World%20Down%20Syndrome%20Day%20(WDSD,the%20United%20Nations%20since%202012. Makaton sign for World Down Syndrome Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4lJdKjKApY
The next music lesson in our ‘Animals’ unit was entitled ‘Down on the farm’. First, Miss Jones helped us to learn a song all about a visit to the farm: ‘I went to visit a farm one day’. We also added Makaton signs for ‘sheep’, ‘cow’ and ‘pig’. Once we were familiar with the song, we used percussion instruments to replace the vocal sounds for each animal, considering whether each sound needed to be high or low pitched and if it was a gentle sound, or a scraped sound etc. We then learnt another song, ‘The animals on the farm’, sung to the tune of Wheels on the Bus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXEq-QO3xTg
In our PSED lesson with Miss Jones, we have been thinking about how we can look after our friends and family. We suggested times when family members may need to be looked after by others, such as if they are: ill in bed, crying, feeling upset or cross, feeding a baby, using crutches, looking for something that's lost. We know that adults look after children, but we can help to look after their feelings. We also thought about looking after our friends, asking: When might someone need help from a friend? Can you tell your friend how you would like them to help you? Finally, we acted out scenarios and how we could help, such as: you are playing with friends and you notice one person alone who seems sad; someone at school fell down and is hurt; your grown-up is working hard to get dinner ready; your grown-up has come home from work and feels very tired.
We have spent lots of time this week thinking about the most important time of year for Christians: Easter. To make connections with the sequence of events of Holy Week, we first recapped Palm Sunday, singing and signing along to We Have a King who Rides a Donkey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJqFuiafDf8. As we sang, we made a path and waved our palm leaves, just as crowds did for Jesus. We then progressed to our next focus: the Last Supper which took place on the Thursday. After reading about the Last Supper and watching a video retelling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SigoALSS1R8) we explored some elements of the Last Supper in more detail to further understand their significance. First, I washed some of the children’s feet as we considered Jesus, a teacher and leader, washing the feet of his disciples. The children said that they felt shocked and confused when I had said I would be washing their feet and we realised that this is how the disciples felt when Jesus knelt to wash their feet. We asked: How would it have felt to have Jesus wash your feet? Why did Jesus do that? The children quite rightly concluded that this was to show respect and love for the disciples, caring for them just as God wants all people to show love and care for one another. We then thought about Jesus sharing the bread and the wine and what they represented. We therefore broke and tasted a variety of different bread, thinking about Jesus saying “This is my body, broken for you. Eat this and remember me.” Finally, we have started to look more closely at the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, focusing on these days when reading the Bible. We talked about the cross and Jesus’ love for everyone; Christians believe Jesus died to save us from all our wrongdoing and rebuild our relationships with God. He came back to life; this is part of God’s big plan. We were inspired to create some Easter artwork which we shall look forward to sharing with you next week.
I am thoroughly looking forward to meeting with you all for next week’s parent consultations to celebrate your wonderful children and the progress that they have made so far in Reception as a result of their hard work.
I hope that it is an enjoyable weekend for all.
Miss Witham
