Reception w/b 24th June
Date: 28th Jun 2024 @ 5:17pm
A week of glorious weather and glorious fun in Reception! The summer season is affording us so many learning opportunities, and we are most especially adoring learning linked to our chrysalises and growing our plants.
It was a lovely return to phonics and guided reading as normal this week and what an excellent week it has been indeed. Mrs McAree, Mrs Griffiths and I have been delighted with the super sentence writing and sound knowledge that the children have demonstrated. We have also observed such fluency, speed and superb comprehension when reading this week. I shall endeavour to complete reading assessments next week.
After a year of hard work planting and maintaining our Reception garden areas, Reception are now all ‘extraordinary gardeners’. We therefore decided to pass on our wisdom, writing instructions titled ‘How to grow a plant’ for younger children to read and follow. We planned our instructions by drawing pictures to act as reminders for ‘what you need’ and ‘what you do’; the children demonstrated an excellent recall of the steps. We wrote a bullet point list of the equipment needed to grow a plant. Then, we have been writing the steps of the process. We used time connectives such as ‘first’, ‘next’ and ‘finally’ and had to be very bossy in our instruction writing! The children demonstrated a superb understanding of sentence skills as they recorded these instructions. Well done, Reception!
In maths, we have been consolidating our knowledge and assessing the following Early Learning Goal: Have a deep understanding of number to 10, including the composition of each number. We have demonstrated our understanding and recall of number bonds of 10 (e.g. 7 + 3, 1 + 9). We have also demonstrated our ability to see the ‘numbers within’ numbers for all of the numbers within 10. For example, ‘seeing the 5’ in numbers (5 needs 2 to make 7, 5 needs 4 to make 9 etc.). The rekenreks were useful tools to demonstrate this knowledge. We have also showed understanding of the magnitude of numbers to 10, playing games to support a growing understanding of the relationships between numbers, recognising quantities that are fewer than, more than or equal to other numbers within 10.
In our athletics lesson, now that we have practised many skills, it was time to prepare to demonstrate these skills on Sports Day. We practised a variety of races, including sprinting, hurdles, relay, and egg and spoon. The children absolutely blew us away with their determination, focus and skill and it was a joy to observe the way in which they supported each other and cheered for all of their friends. We were also delighted with their speedy understanding and excellent listening which meant that the races ran very smoothly, including the more complicated logistics of the relay race! Well done Reception, a superb first session practising for Sports Day.
This week, we have continued to create artwork in the style of Claude Monet; in the provision, the children have continued to use masking tape and finger painting inspired by his series of paintings of bridges. We have peeled the masking tape off of all of the pictures to reveal the bridge shape and these look fantastic! This week, we looked at his series of paintings of water lilies. We have been using collage skills to create our own pictures of water lilies, using strips of paper in a mixture of shades of blue to create the water and layering tissue paper to create 3D lilies.
Our Reception historians have continued to think about seaside holidays throughout time. This week, we learnt that going to the seaside on holiday hasn’t always been something that people have done. Before cars, trains and aeroplanes were invented, it was very difficult for people to travel as it took a long time for them to get to places using horses and carriages. Most people couldn’t afford to do this so, a long time ago, it was only very rich people who went to the seaside. About 150 years ago, there was an invention that changed this. The steam train made it possible for lots of people to travel to the seaside. It was quick and cheap. As the steam train became more popular, more and more people starting going to the seaside for day trips, weekends or holidays. Going to the seaside became a British tradition and people looked forward to enjoying the fresh air, the sand and the sea which were thought to be good for your health. The children showed an excellent understanding and asked thoughtful questions. We enjoyed making a seaside with our small world resources and created a train track for our steam train to transport people to our seaside.
In RE, we have continued to think about special times. Over the next week, our focus is weddings. Today, the children shared their current understanding of weddings. Children talked about their own experiences of weddings, the fact that they had seen photographs of family weddings, and shared knowledge of traditions such as throwing confetti, having bridesmaids, exchanging wedding rings, having a wedding cake, having a party with dancing etc. We thought about the fact that, while many traditions are common between many weddings, not all traditions happen at every wedding and they are all special and unique to the people getting married. We know, for example, that some people choose to be married in a place of worship and some don’t. We thought about the symbolism of the wedding ring; it has no beginning and no end and it represents eternal love. Some children compared this to a life cycle which goes on and on. Next week, we would love offer children the opportunity to share any photos or information about weddings of family or friends. If you have any photographs or information that you would be happy to share, then we would be very grateful.
Much excitement ensued when we arrived at school on Monday morning to discover 9 out of 10 caterpillars were now chrysalises. One caterpillar remained, crawling around on the lid of the pot. By registration, the caterpillar was hanging in a ‘J’ shape and we knew it would be a chrysalis soon! A mere twenty minutes later, in phonics, Louan and Blake spotted that the caterpillar’s skin had started to split, revealing the chrysalis. Amazingly, we were actually able to observe this process, as the chrysalis shook and twisted around to push out of the splitting skin. It really was incredible. We then left the chrysalises to harden. On Thursday, it was then time to move them to the butterfly net. Miss Witham pulled the lid off the pot and Mrs McAree expertly used a cotton bud to remove any webs, spun by the caterpillars, that surround the chrysalises. This is so that, when the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, it does not become entangled in the webs and damage its wings. The chrysalis shook rather a lot, a clever deterrent for any potential predators. In the heat, some of our chrysalises had dropped off the lid but our non-fiction book advised us not to worry! Miss Witham followed the advice and moved these chrysalises with a spoon to rest on a paper towel in the enclosure. And now we wait! Throughout the week, the children’s writing, drawings and crafts have been inspired by our soon to be butterflies. We can’t wait for them to emerge.
This afternoon, we very much enjoyed time spent in our garden with the help of our Year 4 buddies. We had a watering team, a weeding team and a deadheading team! Our plants are growing nicely and it is super to observe how they flower first, and how these flowers then become tomatoes, seed pods etc. We also enjoyed sharing stories together surrounded by nature and the fruits of our hard work.
Due to ‘new starter’ visits, on Monday, Mrs Taylor is looking forward to working with Reception for a wonderfully creative morning together. Reception are then going to spend the afternoon with Mrs McLean and Mr Simmons for an additional Forest School session. Wow, our class are going to have such a wonderful day!
I hope that you all have a lovely weekend.
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
