Reception w/b 24th March
Date: 28th Mar 2025 @ 5:02pm
It was absolutely delightful to share the Mothering Sunday service with so many of you this week along with a beautiful spring walk. The children really did ever so well and just loved sharing this service with yourselves, as well as our friends in Year 1 and 2. As you will see on the photographs, we ended our visit with a gorgeous morning together at the park. This week has involved lots of beautiful discussion about our wonderful mummies, ahead of Mothering Sunday. The children have been ever so keen to share more about their mummies and what makes them so special. They were delighted to create portraits of their mummies and took such time and care with these paintings, thinking carefully about facial features, the colour of Mummy’s hair etc. The children were ever so proud to share these in Church and have been so keen to bring these home! These portraits were also such clear evidence of superb progress made since drawing and painting self-portraits as a baseline assessment. We also engaged with another expressive arts focused activity in order to create our Mothering Sunday cards. Feeling inspired by signs of spring and our pot of daffodils, the children used excellent observational drawing skills and careful consideration of colour when adding watercolours. A wonderfully calming, joyous springtime activity which produced some beautiful cards – well done, Reception!
We have had a slightly shorter week of phonics and literacy, due to our visit from the theatre and our trip to church. However, the children have worked just as hard! I am very much looking forward to completing reading assessments next week.
In our maths lessons, we have continued to practise recalling the composition of numbers as doubles. This experience of investigating doubles has then helped us to begin to practically explore even and odd numbers. The Numberblocks episode, ‘Odds and Evens’ (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r2l4d/numberblocks-series-2-odds-and-evens) has been really helpful here, helping us to sort Numicon shapes and Numberblock characters (built so that they have 2 columns) into those with long, flat tops (even numbers) and those with an ‘odd one sticking up’ (odd numbers). Investigating the composition of these numbers helped us to spot the two equal columns in the even numbers. We know that two equal parts signifies a double, helping us to realise that even numbers can be composed as doubles.
In our numeral formation session, we practised forming 6 by saying, “Make a curve then make a loop, there are no tricks to make a 6.”
We have been reading lots of non-fiction books about frogs and the children have been like sponges as they absorbed all of this information. One of the parents in Year 1 has very kindly offered some frogspawn to us so that we can watch this life cycle more closely. Miss Witham shall have to source a tank and do some research over the weekend!
In music, we enjoyed another ‘Animals’ lesson. To warm up, we used a ‘Bumble Beats’ play along, focusing carefully to match the different actions to the pulse of the song, maintaining a steady beat. https://youtu.be/SoMnt8wOi80?list=PLLj9zcicoXcMgkYVUb-CF_LaabltjfOoN We learnt a new song entitled, ‘A hedgehog is very prickly’, as well as the Makaton signs for hedgehog, tortoise and rabbit. https://youtu.be/PCVhPrCvknw Finally, we worked on composing our own verses for this song. The children had so many super suggestions, such as ‘a skunk is very stinky’, ‘a cheetah is very speedy’ and ‘a crocodile’s very snappy’. As a class, we chose instruments to best match each animal, thinking about whether the sounds would be long or short, loud or quiet, gentle or harsh.
Singing about hedgehogs then inspired our Forest School activity. We loved using nature to create our own hedgehog models. Mr Simmons showed us how to carefully shape the clay for the body, snap twigs to the perfect length, and then carefully selecting natural objects to represent eyes and noses. These hedgehogs look fabulous, Reception!
We had our final ‘Greetings’ lesson in Spanish. We now know how to say: ¡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; ¡Adiós! = Goodbye! Our final vocabulary was ¡Hasta luego! = See you later! Next, we will start to learn how to name colours in Spanish.
In our PSED lesson, we have been thinking about how we can look after our friends. We asked: When might someone need help from a friend? Can you tell your friend how you would like them to help you? We acted out scenarios and how we could help, such as: you are playing with friends and you notice one person alone who seems sad; someone at school fell down and is hurt. We have such kind friends in Reception!
In PE, we started with our animal warm up once again. We then played a game of ‘Fishes and Tadpoles’. The fish stayed in their ‘ponds’. The tadpoles swam around the playground; if they passed through a pond, they scored a point. The fish tried to pull out the ‘tails’ from the tadpoles! To add an extra challenge, we then had to run with rugby balls, practising how to hold the ball correctly.
In our RE lesson, we thought really carefully about Easter, the most special time of the year for Christians. We recapped on the events of Holy Week that we have focused on so far. Today, our focus was both Good Friday and Easter Sunday – I felt that it was important for children to hear about both of these days together so that they could hear the Good News at the end! We talked about the cross and Jesus’ love for everyone; Christians believe Jesus died to save us from all our wrongdoing and rebuild our relationships with God. He came back to life; this is part of God’s big plan. We are feeling inspired to create some Easter artwork which we shall look forward to sharing with you next week when our Easter cards come home.
On Tuesday, we were very lucky to have a special visit from a theatre group. The children were enthralled by the story, music and puppets as the actors retold ‘The Jungle Book’.
Another week full to the brim of super progress, hard-work and fun! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend and an especially wonderful Mothering Sunday with your children who, as they have shared with joy and enthusiasm this week, love you so very much!
Miss Witham
