Reception w/b 20th May

Date: 24th May 2024 @ 3:51pm

One small step for man, one giant leap for Reception! Wow, what a fantastic Space Day we all enjoyed! Our activities included:

• A planets quiz – we were given 3 clues before having to guess the planet. The children were absolutely brilliant at this due to their super knowledge of our solar system. A class full of scientists!
• Making rocket fruit kebabs – the children selected a variety of fruit and chopped up the fruit into different shapes. We all chose a shape to represent the top of the rocket and some children also chose to make repeating patterns with their fruit. It was great to see the children selecting a variety of fruit and they all enjoyed eating their kebabs at snack time. The children impressed us with their fine motor skills as they did all of the cutting themselves (although I did slice the grapes another time before we ate them, just to be extra safe!).
• Making rocket straws – the children designed, drew and cut out a small picture of a rocket. They then attached their rocket to a thick straw. They selected a thinner straw which would slot inside the thicker straw. When they blew through the thin straw, the rocket straw flew off, making it look like a zooming rocket! We enjoyed experimenting with ways to make our rockets travel further.
• Wax resistant artwork – with wax crayons, we drew space pictures, including planets from our solar system. We made sure to colour each object solidly. As wax is water resistant, we could then paint over the top of our pictures with a black watercolour wash, creating very effective solar system artwork.
• Making ‘asteroid’ rock buns – in Reception, we like to bake each half term and, this week, we made rock buns. We especially enjoyed rubbing the (dairy free) butter into the dry ingredients with our fingers!
• A space movement adventure – to music, we acted out a journey into space. From putting on our space suits and strapping into our rocket, to floating on board the ISS and out on a spacewalk, to hurtling back to Earth at such speed! This was great fun.
• Fizzing planets experiment – this was a fun science experiment to observe the reaction between baking soda and vinegar. We first created a paste from baking soda and vinegar. Next, we added food colouring and shaped the paste into a ball to make it look like a planet. Finally, we used pipettes to gradually add vinegar to the ‘planet’. The children simply delighted in observing the fizzing and bubbling reactions. This fun continued into the provision.
• To end our space day, we enjoyed an astronaut picnic. We sprayed some edible glitter onto our asteroid buns once they had finished baking for a bit of added excitement. Everybody tried a bun and they were a hit – well done, Reception bakers! We also thought about the fact that, as space missions got longer, astronauts needed to find ways to take food that would last a long time without going off. As a result, they take lots of tinned and dried food. We thought about how quickly a peach and a banana would go off. However, tinned peaches and dried banana slices last much longer! We therefore added these to our picnic.

Wow, what an unforgettable day it was! Thank you ever so much for your support with our Space Day; we are so very grateful.

This week, it was once again time for our half termly reading assessment. It is always a delight to spend this time with the children, celebrating their reading progress. Wherever possible, please do practise reading these new books with your child, as well as practising red words and sounds. Between these reading assessments and two courses, I missed out on all of the fun in our classroom from Monday to Wednesday and fun it was indeed, thanks to wonderful Mrs McAree, Mrs Mayson, Mrs Ball and Miss Moran. On these mornings, the children worked hard to create an exciting surprise for me…they had all written Year 1 standard sentences! As an assessment activity, the children looked at a picture to inspire the composition, recall and recording of a sentence with total independence. We were impressed with the children’s ability to retain their sentence and use of sentence features. It was a wonderful surprise – thank you, Reception!

In maths, we were due to be focusing on 3D shape. However, the children were not fully secure in their 2D shape knowledge; whilst they were able to name the shapes, they were not yet secure in their understanding of the properties of these shapes. After a 2D shape focus this week, they are all now experts! We have: hunted for 2D shapes, drawn shapes in shaving foam, made shapes with our bodies, used playdough and sticks to build shapes, pressed shapes into playdough, created shape aliens, and played online shape games. We can name the following shapes: circle, triangle, square, rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, semi-circle. We can also explain how we know a shape is a _____ e.g. it has 4 corners and 4 equal sides, so it is a square. We will focus on 3D shapes next half term.

Monday was World Bee Day and so Tuesday’s Forest School session had a bee focus. We especially enjoyed using natural materials to make bee models.

With Mrs McAree, we enjoyed our fourth Spanish lesson in our ‘Transport’ unit. So far, we have focused on the following phrases: El barco = The boat; El barco flota = The boat floats; El coche = The car; El aeroplano = The plane; El coche circula = The car drives; El aeroplano vuela = The plane flies; El autobús = The bus; El autobús para = The bus stops. This week, we added new phrases: La motocicleta = The motorcycle; La motocicleta acelera = The motorcycle accelerates.

For our final lesson in our RE unit, we revisited and discussed our knowledge of Churches, Mosques and the Mandir. We then asked: What would be the same in each of these places of worship and what would be different? The children had lots of knowledge to share.

Our music lesson was spent learning to sing and sign a new song. The link can be found in our ‘How to Help’ document.

This morning, the classes throughout school partnered up for a ‘reading buddies’ session. Reception partnered with Year 5, with some Reception children heading to the Year 5 classroom and vice versa. Our Year 5 friends were so very kind and enthusiastic; we thoroughly enjoyed sharing some books together. Some of the children chose to share some non-fiction books and their Year 5 buddies were wowed by their space knowledge!

It has been a wonderful Summer 1 half term in Reception and our Reception team have adored every minute with our fabulous class. The children are truly flourishing each and every day and we are wowed by their accelerated summer term progress! Thank you so very much for your continued support; I end this half term bursting with pride and feeling very grateful for our wonderful Reception team of staff, parents and children. I hope that you all have a week of rest and family fun! I am already looking forward to seeing the children again to begin our final half term together.

Miss Witham