Reception w/b 12th February
Date: 16th Feb 2024 @ 4:11pm
And with that, we are halfway through our Reception year! Time truly does fly when you are having fun!
This week, I have been completing phonics assessments. This was a joyful experience as the children were feeling ever so proud of themselves! As a result of their hard work, they are making super progress. We hope that they enjoy sharing their new books/ditty sheets with you. The new reading books should be that bit more challenging but should not feel like a huge jump so please do get in touch if you feel that the new reading level is too tricky at the moment.
This week, we have been exploring Shrove Tuesday. We learnt that Shrove Tuesday is celebrated on the Tuesday before Lent begins; Lent is a time when Christians are getting ready for Easter. In the past, people gave up food like eggs, milk and sugar at Lent so, the day before Lent began, they would use up all these foods by making pancakes. We then learnt that, Swedish people call Pancake Day ‘Fettsdagen’, which means ‘Fat Tuesday’. They eat a pastry called Semla instead of pancakes. Iceland call their Pancake Day ‘Sprengidagur’, which means ‘Bursting Day’. They eat salted meats and peas. We learnt that the three ingredients in pancake batter are: flour, eggs and milk. We thoroughly enjoyed making pancake batter, whisking the ingredients together. In Forest School, Mr Simmons used our pancake batter to cook pancakes over the fire – a tasty treat for all! In our literacy lessons, we have been writing instructions for making pancakes, including a list of ingredients and equipment, and a bossy list of ‘what you do’. We also concluded our work on ‘Naughty Bus’. This week, we read the story one final time, hoping to tempt him to return…we were successful! We worked together to create a list of advice for Naughty Bus, helping him to change his ways e.g. ‘show respect’, ‘be kind’, ‘keep our classroom tidy’. It is a relief to have had him back in Reception!
Within our maths lessons, we have been practising counting beyond 20, recognising the pattern embedded within most of our number names. We were very proud to have counted all the way to 100! While working with numbers to 10, we have been consolidating our understanding that each number has a value of ‘1 more’ than the previous number’ and ‘1 less’ than the next number. We have also used images of the Numberblocks’ and our fingers to help to ‘see the 5’ in numbers e.g. 9 is the same as 5 + 4.
On Thursday morning, it was Reception’s turn to visit St Oswald’s Church for a service with Reverend Sandi. As part of this service, Reverend Sandi told us the Bible story where Jesus calls his disciples from being fishermen to follow him. We each had a chance to catch a fish using magnetic fishing rods and some of us were given the name of a disciple. Thank you ever so much to any parents and grandparents who joined us for this service and a lovely journey to and from Church. As this service had taken place in our usual PE slot, we stopped at the park to run around and explore the equipment – some more exercise in addition to our walk!
In Spanish, we concluded our ‘Greetings’ unit by learning to say ¡Hasta luego! = See you later! We then sang our ‘goodbye’ song. We can now say:
¡Buenos días! = Good morning!
¡Hola! = Hi!
Me llamo… = My name is…
¿Cómo estás? = How are you?
Estoy bien = I am well
Estoy mal = I am not great
Más o menos = So, so
¡Adiós! = Goodbye!
¡Hasta luego! = See you later!
In RE, we listened to another story that Jesus told: The Lost Sheep (Luke 15:4-7). After listening to the Bible story and watching a video retelling, we discussed the question ‘What was Jesus trying to teach us in this story?’ We learnt that Christians believe that God is like the good shepherd, and we are his sheep; he loves each one of us. Sometimes we can be a bit like that lost sheep and feel far away from God, but He is our good shepherd and He will keep searching for us and calling us back into His arms until He finds us. He will celebrate every time we come back to Him, just like how the shepherd rejoiced when he found the lost sheep.
In PSED, we concluded our ‘Keeping Safe’ unit by thinking about the people who keep us safe and professionals who help us. The people who help us most often are the people that we know (family, adults at school, friends etc.) but there are people we don't know whose job it is to help keep people safe (e.g. firefighters, police officers, paramedics, postal workers, lifeguards, dentists). We talked through some scenarios, asking ‘Who can help?’. We recapped the emergency number (999) – children could confidently recall this.
In our music lesson, our warmup was a body percussion play along video for Katrina and the Waves’ Walking on Sunshine. https://youtu.be/h6cDHABySK0 This was a tricky challenge requiring lots of focus – each time that we have practised, we get better and better! For our final lesson in the ‘Weather’ unit, we then learnt the Makaton signs for ‘I can sing a rainbow’. We needed to learn how to sign lots of colours before putting them together to sing along. https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/something-special-i-can-sing-a-rainbow At the children’s request, we ended the day with one final dragon dance!
We are delighted to welcome Miss Jones into Reception as a student teacher as part of her school-based teacher training. We shall endeavour to introduce her to you over the coming weeks and she will remain in school with us until June.
Thank you Reception, for a wonderful Spring 1 half term. I hope that you all have a wonderful half term break, and I shall look forward to Monday 26th February, when our new adventure shall begin.
With huge thanks,
Miss Witham
