Reception w/b 15th January
Date: 19th Jan 2024 @ 4:25pm
It has been a beautiful winter week in Reception! The children are making wonderful progress and we are very proud of their positive, determined attitude to learning.
Our consolidation of Set 1 sounds has continued in phonics and the children continue to impress with their speed and confidence when recognising sounds, reading words and writing words. Now that letter formation habits are becoming more secure, we are encouraging the children to think carefully about the relative size of the letters and their position on the line e.g. ‘in sh, s is small and h is tall’; ‘g is a descender – her face sits on the line, her hair curls under the line’. The children continue to make pleasing progress with their reading and name writing. Next week, our timetable shall be slightly adapted to include a session for guided reading and a session for writing groups. The aim is that, once it is then choosing time, the children will have totally interrupted play alongside the adults in the provision, rather than having to pause their play for an adult directed task. We look forward to the excitement that this shall bring next week.
In our NCETM Mastering Number sessions, we were inspired by the Numberblocks episode ‘Off We Go’. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08cr0y7/numberblocks-series-1-off-we-go We have rehearsed the order of the first 5 numbers and we understand that the position each number holds in our number sequence does not change. We have spent time discovering that each number has a value of 1 more than the previous number – this creates a ‘staircase pattern’. We have played a game of mixing up the staircase pattern and then using the Numberblocks game to reorder them – ‘I’m bigger than you, I’m smaller than you, diddly diddly do’. We have also played ‘hide the Numberblock’ in partners, with our partner closing their eyes and then guessing the hidden block. We challenged our partner to explain how they knew which Numberblock was missing, describing which numbers it was ‘between’ E.g. ‘4 should be between 3 and 5. It is one more than 3 and one less than 5.’ We have continued to link numerals to quantities and have practised forming 0, 1 and 2.
The children continue to be captivated by the Naughty Bus story. This week, we continued to add Makaton signs to orally retell the story, with the aid of the story map. The children can now retell the story so confidently and could sequence the events of the book ever so speedily. This will be so helpful in the weeks that follow as we complete different writing tasks related to the story. This week’s adult-led writing activity involved labelling images of transport. Next week shall involve some rather exciting prompts for more sentence writing…
We were simply delighted when Tuesday morning brought with it a beautiful blanket of snow. What else could we do but change our plans, wrap up warm and head straight out to enjoy the snow?! Reception thoroughly enjoyed exploring the snowy environment and loved perfecting their skills when rolling and compacting the snow to produce snowmen and snow castles. We hope the photos capture the joyful morning that we shared. As we had spent the morning outdoors so as to enjoy the best of the snow, we decided to bring our Forest School objective to the classroom in the afternoon. This way, the children could choose whether to be inside the classroom or head back outdoors into the snow.
Our theme of weather in music continues and this week’s theme, of course, had to be snow! We began by listening to the song ‘North Wind Doth Blow’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/primary-school-songs-the-north-wind-doth-blow/zm74gwx . As we listened, we tapped the pulse on our knees. Once we were able to do this, we used percussion instruments to play the pulse along with the video whilst singing along. We then listened to ‘The Snow is Dancing’ by Debussy, played on the marimba, and discussed how the music matches the snow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbGHIejHWqY . In the provision, children then created their own music inspired by the snow, using quiet, gentle sounds.
Enormous fun was had by all in this week’s PE lesson as we launched our new unit ‘Football FUNdamentals’. The object was to move with a ball using our feet. After a warm-up ‘hotspots’ game, we began to experiment with moving the ball around the hall with our feet. To keep the ball close to us, we needed to use small, gentle touches with the ball. We also discovered that we needed to use the inside of our foot to touch the ball, not the toe – ‘toe toe toe, no, no, no’! Once we were feeling more confident, we added cones to the hall and were challenged to dribble the ball around the hall, avoiding the cones. There was now an added challenge of keeping an eye on the ball as we weaved between cones, whilst also frequently looking up to avoid bumping into our friends. I was ever so impressed with our Reception footballers; we predict that this will be a fantastic half term of PE! As shall be indicated on our updated timetable, our PE day shall now be Thursday.
In Spanish, we learnt how to say ‘my name is…’: Me llamo… The children are thoroughly enjoying their Spanish lessons!
In RE, we were once again focusing on stories that Jesus heard. After revisiting our learning from the story of Moses in the bulrushes, we listened to the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. After reading this story, we used drama to retell the events of the story. We thought that Daniel was incredibly brave; his faith in God helped him to feel brave as he trusted that God would always protect him. We thought that Christians could learn that God is always with us and He protects us. The story teaches that God has a plan and we can trust God. In the provision, children made collage lion faces to remind them of Daniel’s bravery and faith, and some children chose to continue retelling the story through drama.
In our PSED lesson, we launched our new ‘Keeping Safe’ unit; this week, we considered what is safe to go onto our bodies. We thought about what we put on our bodies at different times e.g. when we play outside (coat, scarf, hat etc.);if we hurt ourselves when playing (plaster, cream); at night time (pyjamas, slippers). We considered which things are ok, which things are not so good and why. For example, we discussed the fact that we try to keep mud and paint off of our bodies and we certainly don’t want these things in our eyes or in our mouths as this could make us poorly. It is therefore very important that we wash our hands. Next, Isak volunteered to lie on our large sheet of paper whilst we drew around him to create an outline of a person. After labelling the body, we looked at some pictures of things that might go on our bodies. We thought about how these things can help to keep us safe and also the part that they need to play in making sure this happens (e.g. washing with soap to keep safe from germs, putting on warm clothes to keep safe from cold weather).
Inspired by last week’s exploration of toys through time, many of us had returned home to ask our family members about their favourite toys when they were children. Thank you so much to anybody who sent a toy to school for us to learn about; we were very grateful that you trusted us with your toys. The children were just amazed by all of this history and were so engrossed – we could have stayed on the carpet all afternoon! The children also thought that it was ever so funny to look at photos of Miss Witham as a baby/child with the toys that I enjoyed playing with; I had also brought along my walker (a first birthday present), a doll house, a Thomas train, along with a board game and Lego set belonging to my Mum and her siblings. We noticed on a timeline that Miss Witham’s toy was newer than the one belonging to her mum – it was made more recently. In the provision, we then enjoyed playing with the doll house and board game.
Wow, what a lot of learning we have enjoyed this week! Reception, you really are such superstars and such a joy to teach. I wish you all a wonderful weekend.
Miss Witham
