Reception w/b 20th November
Date: 24th Nov 2023 @ 3:40pm
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Reception! In readiness for this evening’s festivities, we have all worked together to decorate our classroom for the season over the last two days. The children have been just thrilled to decorate the trees in particular and they were ever so careful when threading baubles onto branches. It really is a magical time and brings to mind the lyric ‘tiny tots with their eyes all aglow’. Wonderful!
Nativity preparations are in full swing as we have had three sessions in the hall this week. We have been blown away with how quickly the children have picked up the ‘flow’ of the performance, learning their cues, lines and positions ever so well. It promises to be a real treat. Please do refer to this week’s email to find out more about selecting tickets for the performance. A reminder that we also ask for costumes to be brought into school on Wednesday 29th November, ready for our dress rehearsal the following day. Please do get in touch if you are struggling to find a costume; many of the costumes have already been borrowed but I am sure we could work together to create a costume. Nativity song lyrics have been attached to the ‘How to Help at Home’ document as well as a video signing along to ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ for any children who are keen to sing along at home.
Through reading with the children over the last four weeks, it became clear that I needed to complete an early reading assessment, as opposed to waiting until the end of term. My goodness me, I was absolutely amazed! Each and every child has made wonderful progress in the past four weeks, both with their sound knowledge and blending skills. It was a joy and a delight to observe the pride that the children felt in their hard work. I must also express such thanks for your support at home, helping your children to learn sounds where there had been gaps, as well as practising their reading. This has undoubtedly helped the children to make such superb progress. Well done Reception; we are very proud of you!
Name writing also continues with equal success; the children only get better each week with remembering the letters in their name and how to correctly form them.
In our maths sessions, our focus has been comparison. Language has been a key focus as we have used ‘more than’, ‘fewer than’ and ‘an equal number’ to describe how many objects there are in each set. As the focus this week has been on countable things, ‘fewer than’ is used rather than ‘less than’ and ‘more than’ is used rather than ‘greater than’.
There has been much excitement in our literacy sessions as we launched a new focus text…Supertato! We began with a box of clues: a mask, a cape, some vegetables and some tape. We predicted what our story may be about and discussed the relevance of each object. Finally, we revealed our soft toys: Supertato and Evil Pea. Many children were already familiar with this story so were able to then guess the title! We were most interested to learn that the story has two authors who both equally share the task of illustrating. We were impressed by their teamwork! We have spent the week exploring the story and vocabulary within it such as leapt, grin, shrieked, caught his eye, gasped etc. Our new story has inspired lots of enthusiastic independent provision writing, including making ‘Wanted’ posters for Evil Pea and sending messages to Supertato. The children have also been keen to catch Evil Pea, creating traps within the provision and using their fine motor skills to pick out the ‘evil’ pea with tweezers. We have no doubt that this story will inspire lots of superb learning over the next few weeks.
Mr Simmons was keen to enhance our attempts to trap the Evil Pea. In Forest School, he provided us with materials and techniques for creating traps. A particular favourite involved weaving a web between tree trunks…I don’t know if we will capture the Evil Pea, but many teachers certainly became tangled in the traps!
It was lovely to welcome our Patron of Reading, Mrs Winward, into school on Monday. As an author, she brought her book Zee Zee the Zebra with her to read to us. It was a great story about kindness and loving each other- values that underpin our school values of wisdom, hope, compassion and respect. After the story, EYFS and Year 1 were most keen to show and share the ways they are kind to others and include others. No outsiders at Brereton!
Our RE unit is now Christmas and thus our session focused on the story of Jesus’ birth. We have explored different nativity books and looked at artwork depicting the birth of Jesus from a variety of countries. The children helped me to sequence the story using a Nativity set; preparing for our performance really has helped to embed an understanding of the story of the very first Christmas. We talked about why Jesus was such a special baby and why people were keen to visit him. We thought about the long journey of the wise men and the precious gift of a lamb from the shepherds.
What a festive week it has been! We are very much looking forward to welcoming you all to our performance next Friday. Please do get in touch if you have any queries at all.
I wish you all a wonderful weekend and I may see many of you this evening. If the forecast proves to be correct, it certainly will be a weekend of wrapping up warm!
With many thanks for your superb support,
Miss Witham
