Reception w/b 27th January
Date: 31st Jan 2025 @ 5:13pm
What an exciting week we have shared! On Wednesday, it was be Lunar New Year and so this celebration has inspired much of our learning this week. We know that Lunar New Year is celebrated in many countries in different ways but we focused particularly on Chinese New Year traditions. It was interesting to learn that Lunar New Year is always in January or February, but the date changes each year because it follows a very old calendar which is linked to the phases of the Moon. We learnt about traditions such as: cleaning houses to sweep away bad luck; decorating with/wearing red as it is thought to be a lucky colour; having lucky fruits including mandarins, apples and bananas; children being given red envelopes full of money or sweets; dragon and lion dancing in the streets, often accompanied by fireworks. You may find these CBeebies links of interest: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/chinese-new-year https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/curations/chinese-lunar-new-year. We were then introduced to the story of the Chinese Zodiac Race and enjoyed acting it out with puppets. Tuesday’s literacy task was to label images of the animals from The Great Race, such as ‘dog’ and ‘ox’. On Wednesday, we were keen to find out the Zodiac animal for the year that we were born – those born in 2019 were born in the year of the pig, and those born in 2020 were born in the year of the rat. We drew pictures of our animal and captioned them with ‘the year of the pig/rat’. Throughout the week, we have also enjoyed making dancing dragons, Lunar New Year fans, writing Mandarin good luck messages with gold pens, making playdough dragons, retelling the story of The Great Race in the small world, exploring Lunar New Year traditions in the home corner, and cooking some delicious Chinese food in our Brereton restaurant and takeaway. One of our favourite activities has involved making a giant dragon head! We are really looking forward to our dragon dancing next week. Our hope was to do this today, but, in complete honesty, it has been such a busy day! I felt that to squeeze this in this afternoon could have felt too rushed and overwhelming for the children so wanted to do it justice next week instead. We will then leave the dragon in our outdoor area to keep enjoying over the next two weeks. Thank goodness that Lunar New Year celebrations last for 15 days! Today, we have, however, thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to taste some food. We tried vegetable spring rolls, vegan ‘prawn’ crackers, and, perhaps most excitingly, fortune cookies! It was wonderful to see so many children trying the foods, lots of children changing their minds and deciding to give something a try after seeing their friends enjoy the food. We were very proud of the children! Thank you, Reception, for such a lovely week of celebrations.
It was another excellent week of phonics and guided reading; all of our phonics teachers are thoroughly enjoying listening to our wonderful Reception readers each day. We are particularly working on our fluency, at this point, encouraging the children to reread a sentence after decoding the words. We are very pleased with the progress the children are making with this skill. We are also now asking children to really consider their handwriting and presentation when writing, carefully considering the position of the letters on the line and their size e.g. ‘y’ is a descender, ‘l’ is a tall ascender, ‘n’ is small and sits neatly on the line. Wonderful work, Reception! I already can’t wait to complete reading assessments before half term.
In our maths sessions, we have been consolidating our understanding of the composition of 5. Composing and decomposing numbers involves the children investigating part–part–whole relations, e.g. seeing that 5 can be made of 3 and 2. We have focused on the nursery rhyme ‘Five Little Speckled Frogs’, drawing out number bonds of 5 from practical experiences involving moving frogs from a log to a pool (e.g. 4 frogs on the log, 1 in the pool, 5 frogs altogether… 4 + 1 = 5). Activities have included:
- Throwing beanbags (frogs) into a hoop (the pool). How many beanbags landed in the hoop? How many did not? How many beanbags are there altogether? We then represented this in a number sentence.
- Using Numicon to investigate ‘5 jigsaws’. Starting with a 5 Numicon shape, we investigated which shapes could combine on top to create the same shape (1 and 4, 2 and 3, 0 and 5 etc.).
- Playing hiding games. The children closed their eyes whilst some of the frogs were hidden in the pool (under a blue cloth). How many frogs are still on the log? So how many must still be in the pool? How do you know?
- Using cubes in 2 different colours to build towers of 5 e.g. 3 blue cubes and 2 yellow cubes. 3 + 2 = 5.
In RE this week, we enjoyed the story of Moses in the bulrushes. We asked: How would you have felt if they had been the princess finding the baby? We discussed what Christians may learn from these stories: God is always with us, God is faithful, God has a plan, God protects us, God listens and we can trust God. In the provision, the children enjoyed using their fine motor skills to weave baskets.
Our PE objective was to move a ball using the inside of our feet. After a warmup game of ‘Miss Witham says’, we recapped learning from the last two weeks, thinking about how to successfully dribble with the ball. We thought about using gentle touches, using the inside of our foot (not our toe), keeping the ball close to our body, looking both at the ball and around the space, and stopping the ball by placing our foot on the top. After some practise dribbling between the sticky spots, we split into two teams for a fun game. One team were tasked with dribbling to a sticky spot and then kicking the ball towards the brick to knock it over. The other team were tasked with dribbling to the sticky spots to stand the bricks back up again! Wonderful teamwork, Reception!
Wow Reception, you are all such superstars! A week of hard work indeed and what a pleasure it is to observe the fun that has been enjoyed whilst the children engaged in this learning. Next week promises to bring yet more exciting experiences, beginning with a Forest School session all about birds. We are looking forward to being inspired by the RSPB Big Schools’ Birdwatch throughout the week.
I hope that you all have a lovely weekend and that the children enjoy a well-earned rest!
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
