Reception w/b 21st April
Date: 25th Apr 2025 @ 4:25pm
A warm welcome back to the summer term and to a week of lighter mornings and some beautiful sunshine. The children have also 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. In the summer term, our phonics team consists of myself, Mrs Mayson, Mrs Coles and Mrs Marshfield; both Mrs Coles and Mrs Marshfield are part of our Year 1 team. We all 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. Inspired by Yan collecting treasures, we each wrote a sentence about the treasures that we would collect in a jar. On Wednesday, we listened out for our focus vocabulary when reading the story: 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. Star in the Jar always inspires lots of lovely space-themed writing, from stories to facts about our Solar System. It promises to be a superb half term of writing!
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. The Numberblocks episode ‘Ten Again’ is a very catchy song which many of us are already using to help us to speedily recall the bonds e.g. “8 plus 2, visiting the zoo.” I will include the link below; apologies if it becomes an earworm for you all as I will certainly be singing it all weekend! https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bn5k6h/numberblocks-series-3-ten-again
In our numeral formation session, we practised forming 8 by saying, “Make an s and do not wait; go back up and that’s an 8.”
Our Expressive Arts and Design focus for the week has been colour mixing. 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.
On Tuesday, it was Earth Day, a day to encourage people around the world to think and learn about what we can do to look after our planet. We can do these things all year round, not just on Earth Day. In our discussion, suggestions included: picking up litter; planting trees and flowers; recycling; turning off lights; turning off taps to use less water; using eco-friendly products and less plastic. To help celebrate Earth Day, we have been busy making posters, planting new seeds and creating artwork to represent our wonderful planet. The children especially enjoyed using cotton buds to paint the Earth and using PVA glue, salt and paints to create brilliantly blended colours. Of course, we have also been busy recycling, turning off lights and picking up litter.
During our story time on Wednesday, we listened to the story of St. George and the dragon. We learnt that St. George’s Day is celebrated in England every year on 23rd April and Saint George is the patron saint of England. The flag of England is called the St. George’s Cross. In provision time, many children have chosen to create their own shields with the St. George’s Cross using junk modelling resources. Finally, we have referred to the following videos to understand how St. George’s Day is celebrated: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/lets-celebrate-st-georges-day . https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000vdr7/my-first-festivals-series-2-5-st-georges-day .
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: “the library just like Matilda”; “Cornwall with my daddy and my brother”; “a museum because I love looking at the fossils”; “I love going to Manchester with my whole family”; “at the beach because I feel relaxed”. 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 posed the question: What makes a place special or holy? We are looking forward to investigating this question more fully over the half term.
In music, we have been developing our understanding of rhythm. We especially enjoyed using Chrome music lab (https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Rhythm/), adding the dots to create different rhythms. We then played one of our favourite clapping games - ‘Don’t Clap This One Back’.
In Spanish, we launched our new unit: ‘Colours and Numbers’. This week, we were introduced to five colours: rojo = red; amarillo = yellow; azul = blue; verde = green; gris = grey. Throughout the half term, we will say the colours in Spanish whilst signing in Makaton, to help us to remember both the Spanish colour names and Makaton colour signs.
In our PE slot, we enjoyed our first dance lesson, with a space theme. We practised our hopping, jumping, skipping and galloping skills before we enjoyed a game of ‘pass the dance move around the circle’. We worked together to create a dance to the song ‘Rocket Ship’, listening to the lyrics to help us to think of the movements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUEAzpitMjk The children had fantastic ideas and fantastic dance moves! To cool down, we moved to slower music, twirling, waving, throwing and wiggling our scarves.
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…Mrs Mayson and Miss Witham included! I hope that you all enjoy a lovely weekend and I shall look forward to seeing everybody on Monday. Mrs Mayson and Mr Simmons are especially looking forward to a team activity as Mr Simmons challenges us to build a rocket in Forest School!
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
