Reception w/b 9th January
Date: 13th Jan 2023 @ 4:14pm
What a busy week it has been in Reception! The children have been so enthused about our Naughty Bus topic and all of the learning and enhancements it has inspired; this has been so lovely to see.
Our consolidation of Set 1 sounds has continued in phonics and the children continue to impress with their speed and confidence when recognising sounds. Our focus on reading and writing three-sound words continues. The more confident children are with oral blending (e.g. you give a child the sounds h-o-t and they blend and say ‘hot’) the easier they will find the progression to reading words (recognising/saying the sounds themselves and then blending to a word). Continuing to practise lots of Fred talk at home will support your child with this. Thank you so much for your commitment to reading each book with your child three times; this support is invaluable and the children just love to share their reading successes. When writing words, we continue to emphasise the importance of beautiful handwriting as we focus on our correct sitting position, pencil grip and letter formation. If you would like to support your child with their handwriting at home, the Read Write Inc. formation sheets on our website are a great place to start (teaching and learning – curriculum – reading – Read Write Inc.).
In our NCETM Mastering Number sessions, our key focus has been the stable order principle – rehearsing the order of the first 5 numbers and understanding that the position each number holds in our number sequence does not change. As part of this learning, we have recognised the ‘staircase pattern’ that is created when ordering number towers from 1 to 5. We have spent time discovering that each number has a value of 1 more than the previous number. Using blocks and squares to order quantities from 1 to 5 would help to embed this key understanding. We are developing our understanding of ordinality which will develop into a generalisation that every whole number is 1 more than the previous number. This will begin to provide depth of understanding about our counting system and will support activities, such as positioning numbers on scales and on number lines, as the children move through Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2.
Within Numicon Firm Foundations, we have been using language of more/fewer (which Numicon shape has more/fewer holes?) and longer/shorter (which number rod is longer/shorter?). We continue to practise counting forwards and backwards along the number line and matching the Numicon shapes to the number line. In our provision, we have been copying Numicon shape patterns on the peg boards and making Numicon towers which is a great practical activity for noticing the parts of a whole. In our adult-led maths groups, we have been ordering Numicon shapes and matching them to the numerals.
The children continue to be captivated by the Naughty Bus story. This week, we were introduced to our story map and worked together to invent actions to help us to retell the story. We also remembered the Talk for Writing actions for: and, but, first, next, after that. The children can now retell the story so confidently and could sequence the events of the book ever so speedily. This helped them to create their own story maps, just like an illustrator! We then used our own story maps to orally retell the Naughty Bus story. This will be so helpful in the weeks that follow as we complete different writing tasks related to the story.
As the Naughty Bus is a toy that was given as a gift to the boy, we have been investigating toys within our Understanding the World learning. Thank you ever so much for the toys that you sent in; we simply loved exploring these further. The children thought that it was ever so funny to look at photos of Miss Witham as a baby/child with the toys I enjoyed playing with; I had also brought along my walker – a first birthday present! Mrs North had brought three exciting things to show us: her first teddy, a book she received while at school and a transformer plane that she loved to play with as a child. We loved looking at first teddies belonging to mums and dads, treasured rocking horses, board games enjoyed by parents, an exciting tractor and a very special wooden toy belonging to a grandparent. Several children also shared their own favourite toy. All of the children had such a lot to tell us and were fascinated and delighted by each and every toy. We also enjoyed videos/advertisements for old toys. Whilst we were confidently able to explain whether a toy was old or new, we noticed that most of the ‘old’ toys were toys that we would still like to play with now. It was most often the materials that would differ between the old and new toys as we all agreed that teddies, board games, rocking horses, transformers etc. would all still be popular now!
Naughty Bus has also inspired some Forest School learning this week. On Tuesday, due to the very wet weather, we enjoyed an indoor Forest School session creating clay characters with Mr Simmons. On Thursday, we were able to enjoy an outdoor Forest School session, within which Mr Simmons took us on a Naughty Bus journey! We explored the school grounds but especially enjoyed looking at our reflections in the puddles, just like Naughty Bus did. During our journey, Mr Simmons also helped us to identify pine needles and taught us that pine trees would be a good place to stand under when you want to shelter from the rain.
Naughty Bus looking at his reflection was also the hook for our art activity this week. We very much enjoyed time with our Brereton artist, Mrs Taylor! We studied our reflections in mirrors to help us to draw self-portraits. Mrs Taylor helped us to identify features and how to position/draw these to help our drawings to look just like us. We then added watercolours to the line drawings. It was wonderful to see the progress from our baseline assessment portraits that were painted in our first week of school.
On Tuesday, we launched our My Happy Mind unit: Appreciate. Appreciate is narrated by Arabella and is focused on teaching children the following: how being grateful or being thankful make us feel; the different ways to show gratitude or to express our thanks; the importance of taking time out to stop and be grateful or thankful. We shared the story for this unit: Arabella and her friends at the seaside. We noticed all of the things that Arabella had been thankful for which inspired a discussion about things that we were thankful for in our lives as well as things specific to that day. We combined all of the suggestions to create a prayer of thanks.
On Wednesday, we enjoyed our first RE lesson for our new unit: Forgiveness. We first asked: Have you ever done anything wrong? What did you do? What happened? This led into a discussion about the need for saying ‘sorry’ and what this means. We listened to the story ‘Eleanor Won’t Share’ and reflected on Eleanor’s choices and how her apology helped her. After listening to the sorry song, we worked together to model some example apologies.
Our Thursday afternoon session began with a PSED circle time. This was our first ‘Friendship Terrace’ lesson. Friendship Terrace is a series of 10 stories, with discussion questions, about characters who live on Friendship Terrace, used to reflect on and teach about friendship skills. This week’s story focused on Fitzroy First, the character living in the first house on Friendship Terrace. In the story, Fitzroy wanted to be first and win everything and was rather frustrated and unkind when he didn’t win. As a result, his friends did not want to play with him as they were not having fun playing with somebody who was so competitive and didn’t want anybody else to win. At the end of the story, Fitzroy learns to concentrate on taking part and having fun and he therefore has a much happier time playing together with his friends.
After this circle time, it was time for our gymnastics session. After a wake and shake warm up, we recapped the shapes that we learnt with Mrs Edwards last week: Rocket (straight shape), Star, Sitting Star (straddle), Moon, Dish (dish), Flying Saucer (arch), Squatty Alien (squat) and Pike Alien (pike). There were some beautiful demonstrations from the children! It was then time to build our gross motor and balancing skills using some apparatus. We rotated through three activities: balancing along a bench and then jumping off; climbing onto the horse, holding a balance on top of it and then jumping off; balancing a beanbag on our head and then travelling through an obstacle course. We remembered to land like a gymnast when we jumped off of the equipment. What wonderful gymnasts we have in Reception!
In our provision time this week, some particularly popular activities have included: fishing for Numicon shapes in the water trays; making cups of tea in our sensory outdoor tuff tray; threading pipe cleaners through a colander; listening to The Gruffalo on the CD player; making Numicon towers; using loose parts to represent numbers.
Finally, we very much enjoyed another visit from Open the Book this week. On Tuesday, Open the Book visited us to perform the next part of the story of Joseph. We were captivated as we discovered how Joseph was able to interpret dreams.
Reception, I hope that you all enjoy a restful weekend after all of your hard work this week. Next week, we can look forward to several enhancements inspired by Lunar New Year. Another exciting week beckons!
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
