Reception w/b 17th March
Date: 21st Mar 2025 @ 5:28pm
Spring has sprung indeed and Reception are thoroughly enjoying observing and discussing seasonal changes, signs of new life and some beautifully sunny and warm weather. It has been a joy to spend the week with our wonderful Reception class who are flourishing in all areas and working incredibly hard.
We have focused on some rather tricky Set 2 special friends (vowel sounds) within phonics this week but the children were undeterred by this challenge, continuing to write their words and sentences with confidence. We are all becoming increasingly speedy and fluent when reading sentences and I am already looking forward to our upcoming reading assessments.
Our literacy lessons have sparked such joy and pride this week as we have each written our very own story! We have been inspired by Dan losing his red ball in ‘The Something’. We have written and illustrated a three-sentence story, writing a sentence per day – a wonderful achievement. In our opening sentence, we each chose an object to lose and a place to lose it. These included: losing a teddy in a hole, Elsa in a storm, and a toy car in a dragon’s den! Next, we wrote a problem sentence; we tried to retrieve the object but we were unsuccessful! These included: using a long rope, a digger and a fishing net. At last, our story concluded with a happy ending as we each invented a creative way to retrieve our object. These have been so lovely to read and I shall endeavour to send some individual photographs via Dojo. I have been so very impressed with the independence and confidence observed within this process, as children consider their use of capital letters, full stops, finger spaces, correct letter formation and use of Fred Fingers. We have a class full of wonderful authors! Next week, we shall apply our super writing skills within a non-fiction context as we follow and extend our current interest in frogs.
On World Poetry Day, we enjoyed sharing some of our favourite poems during story times. Our favourite poems are nonsense poems! We loved hearing ‘The Land of the Flibbertigibets.’
Our NCETM Mastering Number focus has been doubles; we have continued to explore the composition of numbers within 10, focusing on the ‘special case’ of when 2 equal parts combine to make a whole. First, we used our skills of comparison to identify when 2 sets are equal or NOT equal. As we have explored 2 equal parts of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, we have applied our subitising skills as well as starting to recall some doubles facts when an image or physical resource is not available to support us. By the end of Reception, we aim to know that:
Double 1 is 2.
Double 2 is 4.
Double 3 is 6.
Double 4 is 8.
Double 5 is 10.
In our numeral formation session, we practised forming 5 by saying, “Straight line down, then around, hat on top and 5’s a clown.”
In our Forest School session, Mrs McAree taught us all about the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Andy creates land art (sculptures with natural materials) on sites in the UK and around the world. We recognised that he uses leaves, twigs, pebbles, rocks, ice, flowers, grass and pinecones but were most surprised to discover that he also uses human hair and cow dung! The children made some very interesting observations when looking at photographs of Andy Goldsworthy’s art and could confidently explain their opinions. Feeling inspired, we headed into our Forest School session to create our own land art with natural materials.
The next music lesson in our ‘Animals’ unit was entitled ‘Down on the farm’. First, Mrs McAree helped us to learn a song all about a visit to the farm: ‘I went to visit a farm one day’. We also added Makaton signs for ‘sheep’, ‘cow’ and ‘pig’. Once we were familiar with the song, we used percussion instruments to replace the vocal sounds for each animal, considering whether each sound needed to be high or low pitched and if it was a gentle sound, or a scraped sound etc. We then learnt another song, ‘The animals on the farm’, sung to the tune of Wheels on the Bus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXEq-QO3xTg
Thursday was World Oral Health Day and so we thought carefully about how to look after our teeth. We know that it is really important to brush our teeth twice a day to get rid of any food that is around our teeth and to wash away any sugar and other things that can hurt our teeth. We talked about brushing our teeth, where we need to brush and how. We also talked about visiting the dentist and children shared their experiences of what happens during a visit to the dentist. We thought about food and drinks which have lots of sugar in them so we shouldn’t have too many of them; this doesn’t mean that we can’t eat or drink these things, just not all of the time. We have then enjoyed using the giant set of teeth and toothbrush to practise our brushing skills! More information about taking care of children’s teeth can be found via this link: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-teeth-and-gums/taking-care-of-childrens-teeth/
In Spanish, we built on the language learnt so far (¡Buenos días! = Good morning!; ¡Hola! = Hi/Hello!; Me llamo… = My name is…; ¿Cómo estás? = How are you?; Estoy bien = I am fine; Estoy mal = I am not great; Estoy regular = So, so). Our new objective was to say ‘goodbye’ in Spanish = ¡Adiós!. We loved learning a new ‘goodbye’ song.
It was so lovely to be able to have our PE lesson on the field, in this wonderful spring weather. Our focus was to move around whilst knocking targets down with a ball. To warm up, we travelled around the field, moving like different animals. Next, we split into two teams, ‘Building Beavers’ and ‘Wrecking Rhinos’. The rhinos ran around pushing over the foam bricks, whilst the beavers ran around standing them back up, without either team being allowed to enter the hoops. We then swapped roles. Once we were familiar with the rules of the game, the rhinos then had a ball each which they needed to dribble around the field and then kick to knock down the bricks. The teams then swapped once again. We had lots of fun and improved our accuracy!
Today has been World Down Syndrome Day – a celebration indeed! Lots of us proudly wore our odd socks today. The reasoning behind the socks is that chromosomes look like socks and we know that people with Down syndrome have three copies of the 21st chromosome (this is also why we celebrate on the 21st of March!). To find out more about World Down Syndrome Day and how you can celebrate, please visit https://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/our-work/campaigning/world-down-syndrome-day/#:~:text=World%20Down%20Syndrome%20Day%20(WDSD,the%20United%20Nations%20since%202012. Makaton sign for World Down Syndrome Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4lJdKjKApY
We especially enjoyed reading a book written by the CBeebies presenter George Webster, ‘Why Not?’. This book was gifted to our Reception classroom by our Year 1 friend, Gabriel. Thank you, Gabriel!
I hope that it is an enjoyable weekend for all.
Miss Witham
