Reception w/b 15th April
Date: 19th Apr 2024 @ 5:21pm
A warm welcome back to the summer term and to a week of lighter mornings and glimpses of beautiful sunshine; let us hope that warmer temperatures and drier days are on their way! Thankfully, the children have brought plenty of sunshine to our classroom with their positive attitudes, joyful smiles and boundless enthusiasm! It promises to be a wonderful half term indeed.
We ‘hit the ground running’ with our phonics and were all delighted with how well the children had retained their sounds. Therefore, this half term shall see a real focus on consolidation of our Set 2 sound knowledge and the application of these sounds within more challenging words and sentences. Please do continue to watch the videos and practise these sounds/words at home. As is to be expected after a two week break, we have noticed a little dip with handwriting, so the next few weeks shall also allow plenty of opportunities to practise and refine correct letter formation. Mrs McAree and I also thoroughly enjoyed the chance to read with each new reading group after our latest assessments. It is so wonderful to see the joy and pride that reading with increasing independence, fluency and confidence inspires in the children. We were also delighted to see all of your comments about fantastic reading over the Easter break. Well done Reception!
We were most excited to reveal our Summer 1 focus text…Star in the Jar by Sam Hay. This is a beautiful book and it has been such a pleasure to observe how it has captured the children, who have had an abundance of thoughts to share about the story. With Miss Jones, we explored the vocabulary in the story, particularly focusing on: treasure, tickly, glittery, special, loved, shinier, ‘even litterbin treasure’, ‘something extra special’ and ‘as the day turned to night’. This has also inspired us to improve our vocabulary choices, selecting interesting adjectives to describe the star and the main character, Yan. We are very much looking forward to beginning to use a text map to retell the story. This is one of our favourite stages in the sequence of our literacy units and this stage shall begin on Monday.
In maths, we started to explore number bonds of 10. The children are picking this up so quickly and are showing an impressive understanding. We have used Numicon shapes, working out which two shapes could fit together to make the 10 shape. We have used finger patterns to represent 2 parts of 10, using the ‘fingers up and fingers down’ approach (e.g. when holding 7 fingers up, 3 fingers are folded down: 7 + 3 = 10). Finally, we have explored the composition of 10 using ten frames and double dice frames, helping us to subitise the parts of 10. We asked, ‘I have 8 counters in my ten frame. How many empty spaces do I have? What does 8 need to make 10?’. Our ‘bonds of 10’ focus shall continue into next week and we shall then revisit this knowledge throughout the half term.
For the first two weeks of term, our Spanish lessons are dedicated to consolidating learning from last half term. This week, we recapped the colours, saying them in Spanish and signing them in Makaton. We also have enjoyed a Language Angels song to help us to practise these colours: rojo = red; amarillo = yellow; azul = blue; verde = green; gris = grey; blanco = white; violeta = purple; naranja = orange; marrón = brown; negro = black. Next week, we shall recap numbers to 10.
It was a real mixture of weather during our Forest School session! Whilst the sun shone, we enjoyed exploring our Forest School environment; as it changes along with the seasons, we are noticing lots of evidence of spring and are starting to think about the summer changes in the (seemingly very distant!) future. We used lots of the nature that we had found to make nature aliens. Strangely, the weather changed quite suddenly, and we found ourselves caught in the hail! We spent a few minutes feeling amazed and excited by the hail, exploring the hail stones, before heading inside to shelter.
After a shorter half term for Spring 2, we decided to carry over our final ‘Enjoy a Ball’ lesson to enjoy with Miss Jones this week. We were very excited to be using rugby balls! We played a game of ‘ponds’, with the ‘fish’ in the ponds and the ‘tadpoles’ swimming around the area. If they ran through the pond, they won a point but risked the ‘fish’ pulling out their ‘tail’, and the fish therefore winning the point! This was lots of fun. We also played games to develop passing skills and aiming with accuracy. Next week, our athletics sessions begin!
In our Understanding the World time, we have been thinking about Eid Al-Fitr, a Muslim festival which marks the end of the month of Ramadan. We learned that, during Ramadan, some grown-ups and older children who are Muslims do not eat or drink anything, including water, during the day while the sun shines. This is called fasting. Shamsa taught us that, during Ramadan, Muslims try to be really kind to other people, trying to do a good deed each day. During Ramadan, Muslims also pray more than normal, sometimes at the Mosque and sometimes at home. Ramadan lasts for 29 to 30 days. We know that it is the end of Ramadan when a new crescent moon is spotted in the sky. At the end of Ramadan, Muslims have a big celebration, called Eid al-Fitr when they wear their best clothes and eat lots of yummy foods. ‘Eid Mubarak’ is a greeting often used during the festival. It means ‘Have a blessed Eid!’ We explored how Eid is celebrated. The following videos were a particularly helpful source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/lets-celebrate-eid . In the home corner, children have enjoyed cleaning, decorating and preparing food for Eid and, at the creation station, have decorated their own crescent moons and lanterns.
Our Expressive Arts and Design focus for the week has been colour mixing. With Miss Jones, we have been identifying 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. We have enjoyed painting our hands and then rubbing our hands together to mix the colours! Next week, we shall explore tints and tones.
In music, again, due to a shorter Spring 2, we carried over our final ‘Animals’ lesson. To warm up, we used a ‘Bumble Beats’ play along, focusing carefully to match the different actions to the pulse of the song, maintaining a steady beat. https://youtu.be/SoMnt8wOi80?list=PLLj9zcicoXcMgkYVUb-CF_LaabltjfOoN We learnt a new song entitled, ‘A hedgehog is very prickly’, as well as the Makaton signs for hedgehog, tortoise and rabbit. https://youtu.be/PCVhPrCvknw Finally, we worked on composing our own verses for this song. The children had so many super suggestions, such as ‘a skunk is very stinky’, ‘a cheetah is very speedy’ and ‘a crocodile’s very snappy’. As a class, we chose instruments to best match each animal, thinking about whether the sounds would be long or short, loud or quiet, gentle or harsh. We played along to the verses that we had composed, a grand finale for our ‘Animals’ unit!
Today, we enjoyed this half term’s ‘No Outsiders’ session, focusing on the book ‘Mommy Mama and Me’ by Leslea Newman. We thought about the things that the family like doing together and considered which of these things we like to do with our families. We looked carefully at the child’s facial expression on each page and asked: How are they feeling? How do we know? We recognised that the child feels happy, safe and loved and thought about the people in our own families who make us feel this way.
In RE this half term, we are thinking about special places. Today, we began by asking: What makes a place special? The children shared places that are special to them and why. Answers included: ‘Nana’s house because I love her and she gives me big hugs’; ‘at the beach because I feel relaxed’; ‘going to the zoo with my family because I love animals’. We considered the fact that, for many people, their special place is outdoors, listening to sounds of nature; this prompted us to look at natural wonders of the world. https://youtu.be/3SsK-cxlj_w Finally, we thought about holy places that people visit to worship God. We thought about Shamsa visiting the mosque. We posed the question: What makes a place special or holy? We are looking forward to investigating this question more fully over the half term.
Wow, what a busy week it has been! I have no doubt that there have been lots of tired children this afternoon after squeezing such a lot of learning and fun into our first week back. Early nights for all…Reception staff included! I hope that you all enjoy a lovely weekend and I shall look forward to seeing everybody on Monday.
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
