Reception w/b 20th March
Date: 24th Mar 2023 @ 4:53pm
What an exciting end to our week we all enjoyed today! It has been Dojo exchange morning and the children were most excited to receive a badge, have an extra breaktime, go to the park or have an extra Forest School session. Other children have their eye on a prize and are saving their points up. As a result of our wonderful but busy morning, we did have lots of very tired children this afternoon – lots of eyes beginning to close during story time! I hope it is a lovely but restful weekend for them all.
The children have been working hard to continue to learn and consolidate their Set 2 sounds this week. Please access the videos to find out more about these sessions. We are also working towards more independent word and sentence writing. We have enjoyed our new morning settling activity where we have the opportunity to create our own sentence on a whiteboard based on a new picture each day. You may see lots of photos of this independent writing within this blog – the children were extremely proud of themselves! Miss Toft and I have thoroughly enjoyed reading with all of the children this week and observing their hard work and progress. When reading with your child, please continue to focus on rereading sentences for fluency to aid comprehension. I have assessed several children (who blew me away with their super reading!) and am looking forward to assessing everybody else next week. Due to these assessments and additional enhancements (including the performances of Wind in the Willows and Scrooge), guided reading shall pause next week, ready to continue in our new groups after Easter. Handwriting with Mrs North continued and we are excited to complete another independent name writing check next week to add to our portraits.
In maths this week, our focus has been subtraction by taking away. We have enjoyed several practical activities to help understand the concept in addition to beginning to record these calculations in the form of a number sentence. We have played ‘playdough smash’ where we start with a number of playdough balls (e.g. 6) then choose a number to squish (e.g. 2) to see how many remain (6 – 2 = 4). We have used a ball to knock down skittles to see how many remain standing and have created number sentences from this. We have organised some animals before physically taking them away. We even played taking away with children as we started with a number of children and then some had to hide! We will continue to practise subtracting by taking away next week.
In English, we are coming to the end of writing our losing stories. This is a wonderful achievement and it is clear to see the pride children feel in having written a full page (or even two page!) story – wow!
With Mrs Tice, we have enjoyed singing ‘Hickety Tickety Bumblebee’ and ‘Chop chop choppity chop’. It is such a pleasure to see children growing in confidence in these music sessions as the weeks progress.
Within worship, children heard the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. They heard that although the people grew tired and restless, God provided for them.
On Monday afternoon, we were introduced to 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 Tuesday’s Forest School session to create our own land art with natural materials.
In My Happy Mind, we have continued to think about the importance of active listening and how it is part of being a good friend. We thought about times we have listened and times we haven’t and what the consequences were in each instance. To emphasise the importance of listening, we worked in pairs to complete obstacle courses. One person was blindfolded while their partner gave clear directions to help guide them around the course. Super listening Reception!
To begin our RE session, we read the story ‘Guess How Much I Love you’ by Sam McBratney – one of my childhood favourites. We compared the love between Big Nutbrown Hare and Little Nutbrown Hare to love between ourselves and Jesus and suggested our own measurements of love. These included: “I love Jesus a million hearts.” “I love Jesus all the way along a rainbow.” “I love Jesus to Neptune and back.” “I love Jesus all the way to the moon, all the way round it and all the way back to me.” Just beautiful! Next, we looked at paintings of the Easter story from around the world, thinking about what we liked/disliked, the colours and the mood of the paintings. The children could recognise which part of the story was represented in each painting and referred to them to help retell the events of Holy Week. Many children then enjoyed creating their own watercolour paintings of parts of the Easter story.
Thursday afternoon brought with it our PSED and dance sessions with Mrs Edwards and Miss Toft. This week’s Friendship Terrace character was Tell Tell Tara, who learns not to spoil surprises for her friends.
This afternoon, as part of developing our understanding of the world, we have enjoyed sharing our knowledge of minibeasts. We explored how to use non-fiction books to find out information about minibeasts, such as what they eat, where they live and how their babies grow. This has inspired us to create our own information texts next week. The children enjoyed a game of ‘guess the minibeast’ using clues and we also explored some minibeast toys. We are looking forward to minibeast enhancements in the provision next week, including a minibeast hunt!
Well done Reception – an exciting and busy week for you all. I hope you all enjoy a lovely rest in preparation for our final week of term; there is ever so much to look forward to!
With many thanks and best wishes,
Miss Witham
