Reception w/b 10th March
Date: 14th Mar 2025 @ 5:08pm
It has been a week of confidence, collaboration, and curiosity in Reception, with an abundance of wonderful learning to be proud of.
Within our phonics lessons, we are progressing through the Set 2 sounds with confidence, whilst continuing to recap Set 1 sounds. The children are working hard to write these sounds in words and sentences as we think about our use of capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We are also applying our Set 1 sound knowledge and ability to read 4 and 5 sound words within our guided reading sessions, where we continue to encounter new red words. We love reading your messages in the reading diaries to find out more about how the children have been getting on with their books at home. It sounds like they are working very hard!
Our literacy lessons have focused on rhyming words this week. We asked, ‘What are rhyming words?’, talking about words having the same ending sounds. We practised isolating and then ‘bouncing’ the end of words (e.g. red-ed-ed-ed, bed-ed-ed-ed) to help us to hear the rhyme. On Tuesday, we enjoyed exploring a rhyming basket, matching the objects that rhymed (e.g. pig/wig, pen/ten, goat/boat). Our adult led challenge was then to identify the rhyming words, drawing lines to match them. On Wednesday, Mrs McAree played a game of ‘Silly Soup’ to help us to create rhyming strings, adding words to the ‘soup’ which all rhymed e.g. cat, bat, hat, mat, rat. We also showed this with our pocket chart and sound cards, just changing the beginning sound each time. The children then wrote their own rhyming strings. On Thursday, we read one of our favourite books, ‘Oi Frog!’. We giggled together as we spotted the funny rhymes! Our final challenge of the week was to create our own pages for an ‘Oi Frog!’ story, illustrating a funny rhyming picture and writing a corresponding sentence e.g. ‘Hens sit on pens.’; ‘Bugs sit on mugs.’; ‘Pigs sit on wigs.’ Rhyming can be challenging so would be a wonderful skill to continue to practise at home through rhyming games and stories.
In maths, our focus on subtraction has continued and we are becoming increasingly confident all the time with reading and answering subtraction number sentences. We especially enjoyed knocking down skittles to create a subtraction number sentence! E.g. starting with 5 skittles, 3 were knocked down, 2 were left standing. 5 – 3 = 2. Whilst we shall move on to exploring doubles, even numbers and shapes for the remainder of the half term, addition and subtraction shall continue to be woven into all maths lessons and shall be revisited in Summer 1.
This week, we also had another numeral formation session, we practised forming our numeral of the week (4) by saying, “Down and over, down once more, that’s the way to make a 4.’
This week has been British Science Week and, this year, the theme is ‘Change and Adapt’. Reception have been thinking about seasonal change and the changes that happen in a plant life cycle, including thinking about adaptations of plants. We have been observing change and growth in our fruit and vegetables – so far, we have seen them grow from seeds, to little shoots, to now seeing that the stems are getting thicker and longer and more leaves are growing. We thought about why some plants seem to grow more quickly than others and the differences in their appearance. We wondered why some of the plants seemed to be leaning one way, realising that they were growing in the direction of the sunlight. We compared these plants growing in the sunlight to our potatoes, which have been growing more roots but in a dark, cold environment. We talked about why, thinking about how potatoes grow and change in their life cycle.
As ever, we thoroughly enjoyed our music lesson as we progressed to the next focus in our ‘Animals’ unit – fish. To warm up, we used this Ocean Odyssey video (https://youtu.be/qv0qzPcj14U?list=PLLj9zcicoXcMgkYVUb-CF_LaabltjfOoN), following the sea creatures and performing different actions to the beat of the song. We then watched this video of the Kanneh-Mason family playing Aquarium from Saint Saen’s Carnival of the animals: https://youtu.be/KOx7zmO5ppw. We discussed the tempo of the music and the different instruments we could see and hear, before moving around the room to the music, imagining we were different sea creatures. The final song of the lesson was ‘Down there under the sea’, performed by Singing Hands (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI9nYYgbAwQ). We learnt to sing the song and sign along. Then, we explored a selection of percussion instruments to decide which instruments would sound most like the fish, whales, sharks, shells and crabs. We split into these 5 groups and selected the corresponding instruments for each animal. Finally, we played along to ‘Down there under the sea’, with each group only playing for their verse.
In Forest School, we absolutely loved hunting for minibeasts, especially worms! We also used nature to create our own minibeasts – leaf beetles were particularly popular.
In Spanish, we built on the language learnt so far (¡Buenos días! = Good morning!; ¡Hola! = Hi!; Me llamo… = My name is…; ¿Cómo estás? = How are you?). Our lesson focus was answering the question ¿Cómo estás? We learnt how to answer with:
Estoy bien = I am well
Estoy mal = I am not great
Estoy regular = So, so
We loved the song for this lesson!
In our PE lesson, we continued to work on our dodging skills to get past the ‘chef’. To add extra challenge, this week, we needed to move past the chef whilst travelling with a ball. We needed to keep the ball close to us!
In our RE session, we have been 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. We then progressed to our next focus: the Last Supper which took place on the Thursday of Holy Week. 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.” We also used juice instead of the wine that Jesus and his disciples shared.
Another wonderful week in Reception! I hope that you all have a lovely weekend.
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
