Reception w/b 8th May
Date: 12th May 2023 @ 4:50pm
Reception should be so proud of their attitude and approach to their learning this week. They have all been ever so busy and have shown excellent understanding and produced beautiful work.
Our Set 2 sound focus in phonics continues, with an emphasis on building speed and independence. It is so wonderful to observe lots of children using Fred Fingers to independently segment words as well as remembering their capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. The trickiest part can often be remembering or ‘holding’ the sentence; it is useful for children to have lots of exposure to copying/repeating sentences aloud and then moving towards remembering the sentences without prompts as they write them.
Reception are now guided reading experts and move so confidently through this carousel. This week, I have reassessed some children as I felt they were ready for a book level change. Please don’t worry if you haven’t had a message about book levels in your child’s diary as these were just a few early assessments – our usual assessment checkpoint is the final week of the half term. Additionally, the children have amazed us with their red word progress. If your child has changed book levels, there shall be some more red words to assess next week. Mrs North has been delighted with the beautiful handwriting she is seeing during the guided reading carousel. Next week, we shall begin to practise handwriting capital letters. Whilst they have been introduced incidentally throughout the year, it will now be beneficial for the children to engage in specific activities to recognise and form capital letters, including matching them to their corresponding lowercase letter. This would be something useful to practise at home. I wonder how many capital letters you can spot in your homes and when out and about?
In maths this week, our focus has been doubling and halving. It has been particularly important to spot equal parts to support our understanding of these concepts. For example, if we can see 3 and 3 (two equal parts), they are a double – double 3 is 6! We enjoyed using symmetrical butterfly wings and creating our own Numicon butterflies to support this concept. The children’s grasp of this concept has been so impressive, and it is evident that the NCETM Mastering Number sessions have really helped to build their numerical fluency. Then, we looked at finding half (of 2, 4, 6, 8, 10). At first, we shared equally, using a ‘one for you, one for you’ method. Repeating this process helped us to realise the connection between doubling and halving – they are opposites. E.g. if double 3 is 6, half of 6 is 3. By the end of the week, many children were automatically recalling these number facts. What wonderful mathematicians we are!
Our work in English has perhaps been our most impressive of all, as we have all been writing at the same time. This week, we have been writing instructions to create our own class recipe book. We were inspired by last week’s street party and so have been writing instructions for making cakes, sandwiches or fruit kebabs. We used time connectives including: first, next, then, after that, later and finally. We used Talk 4 Writing actions to help us to remember these time connectives. We have also had to be rather bossy! For example “spread the butter” or “chop the fruit”. As I am sure you can imagine, the children practised saying these instructions in their bossiest voices! We know that this will really help somebody to follow our recipe when they read it. Over the next few weeks, we shall endeavour to build our independence within these writing sessions. The children really did so very well and applied their sentence ‘rules’ beautifully.
Tuesday’s Forest School slot was unfortunately just too wet to head outdoors. However, the rain could not dampen our spirits and so we conducted our planned activity indoors. The children all made a clay model/s inspired by the coronation. These included models of the crown, orb and sceptre, as well as King Charles and Queen Camilla themselves. These models are now dry and ready to come home on Monday. Luckily, we were able to get out and enjoy the sunshine for our Thursday Forest School session.
The children enjoyed learning some new songs in our music session with Rex. I am in the process of booking a date for a picnic performance of these songs. We can’t wait!
In RE, we revisited the Pentecost story. We discussed: What happened to the disciples in the story? We then reminded ourselves of our previous discussions about the wind. We discussed the fact that we can feel and hear the wind but we can’t see it. This links back to the Pentecost story and how the Holy Spirit affected the disciples. They felt something and they could hear something but could not see anything. We were most excited to discover that this story has become the birthday of the church which is a day remembered every year when God gave the disciples the gift of the Holy Spirit. Next week, we want to think about ways to celebrate the birthday of the church – we already have some super ideas. To end our session, there was time for reflection with a selection of feathers. Children were invited to gently blow on the feathers after saying a prayer. Their words were truly beautiful. This would have made for some wonderful photos but, as ever, the iPad chose a timely moment to run out of charge!
In PSED, Mrs Edwards talked to the children about feeling angry. What makes us feel angry? How does being angry make our bodies feel? What can we do when we feel angry? In their subsequent PE session, the children focused on moving around whilst knocking targets down with a ball. Lots of excellent dribbling skills were observed.
Our Expressive Arts and Design focus for the week has been colour mixing. On Tuesday, we first identified the three primary colours: red, blue and yellow. Our challenge has been to investigate which secondary colours can be made when mixing the primary colours. This helped us to make our own paper plate colour wheels. This knowledge helped us to complete a second art activity on Friday. This involved making shaving foam planets. We spread a thick layer of shaving foam on a tray. We then added dollops of colour. Using a skewer, we swirled them together to create patterns and mix some of the colours. For example, we mixed red and yellow to create some of the oranges of Jupiter and mixed blue and yellow to create the green areas of Earth. Once we were happy with the design, we pressed card on the top to create a printed transfer. These look amazing! Next week, when they are dry, we shall cut out circular shapes from each design to represent the planets.
Our final activity of the week was entitled ‘bubbling planets’. This was a fun science experiment to observe the reaction between baking soda and vinegar. We first created a paste from baking soda and vinegar. Next, we added food colouring and shaped the paste into a ball to make it look like a planet. Finally, we used pipettes to gradually add vinegar to the ‘planet’. The children simply delighted in observing the fizzing and bubbling reactions. It was such fun.
All of these space themed activities are making us so excited for our ‘Space Day’ next Friday. Just a reminder that children are invited to come to school in space-themed costume on this day. Please do get in touch if you are having any difficulties with the costume.
I hope that it is a lovely weekend for everybody and that we can all enjoy some glorious sunshine tomorrow.
With many thanks and best wishes,
Miss Witham
