Reception w/b 29th January
Date: 5th Feb 2024 @ 9:52pm
There has been so very much to enjoy in Week 4 of Spring 1 but I am sure that many children would agree that the highlight of our week was a visit from PCSO Kim and PCSO Pam. They received such a warm, enthusiastic welcome from Reception who were so keen to learn from the PCSOs – we were brimming with questions! We were particularly interested in the uniform that they wore, from the jackets to the body cameras and radios. Of course, we couldn’t resist asking about the Naughty Bus. Whilst we didn’t think he needed to be arrested, PCSO Kim and PCSO Pam suggested that we have a chat with Naughty Bus about knowing right from wrong to encourage him to change his ways. Here’s hoping that we find him soon! Very excitingly, the PCSOs showed us their police car! After listening to the rather noisy siren, along with flashing lights, we all had a turn of sitting in the police car. PCSO Kim showed us the various controls in the car, including how to turn on the siren/lights, as well as pointing out the radio. The PCSOs left us a treat – some stickers and colouring pages from Cheshire Police. This visit also inspired lots of super role play in our new police station.
It was another excellent week of phonics and guided reading; Mrs McAree and I 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 had a new focus song to inspire our maths learning: 5 Little Men in a Flying Saucer. We have been developing our understanding of composition, or the numbers within numbers. A key focus has been exploring ways to represent numbers using the Hungarian number pattern (die pattern). We began by using this representation to consolidate our understanding of the composition of 5 e.g. seeing 5 as 4 + 1. We then progressed to exploring the relationship of 5 with other numbers, using double dice frames. For example, 6 is the same as 1 full die frame + 1 more ( 6 = 5 + 1). This has helped us to explore 6 and 7 as numbers that are composed of ‘5 and a bit’. Numicon has been a particularly useful resource, creating 5, 6 and 7 ‘jigsaws’. We started with a 5, 6 or 7 shape and explored which number shapes could be combined on top to make the same shape. For example, we noticed that combining the 3 shape and the 4 shape made the 7 shape: 3 + 4 = 7.
Our first literacy challenge of the week involved lots of teamwork. We each wrote a page of our class story: Naughty Bus Visits Reception. We used the iPad to take photos of a toy bus around our classroom and wrote captions for the photos on whiteboards, such as ‘I am stuck.’ ‘It is hot. [on the radiator]. We have combined these into a video story, as well as printing a copy for our reading corner. On Tuesday, we could not believe our eyes…the school CCTV cameras had captured footage of Naughty Bus travelling around school! We labelled stills from this CCTV footage to send to the police. After Wednesday’s visit from PCSO Kim and PCSO Pam, we decided to write them a thank you message on Thursday. Next week, we shall walk to the post box to post these messages of thanks.
Mr Simmons continues to share our ‘Naughty Bus’ enthusiasm and, this week, helped us to use large-scale construction materials to make our own bus! Lots of children also chose to use some Forest School time to make traps for the mischievous bus.
In Spanish, we built on the language learnt so far (¡Buenos días! = Good morning!; ¡Hola! = Hi!; Me llamo… = My name is…; ¿Cómo estás? = How are you?). Our lesson focus was answering the question ¿Cómo estás? We learnt how to answer with:
Estoy bien = I am well
Estoy mal = I am not great
Más o menos = So, so
We loved the song for this lesson!
Our PE objective was to move a ball using the inside of our feet. After some fun games dodging through the cones, we paired up with one partner standing on each side of the hall. We practised dribbling the ball to our partner, using the inside of our feet. Reception were excellent at travelling in a straight line, keeping their eye on the ball as well as looking out for other people, using careful, gentle kicks, and keeping the ball close to us. Amazing partner work, Reception! On Tuesday, Mr Aspinall unfortunately ran out of time for Reception’s PE assessments, so Mr McAulay is going to complete these in our next PE session.
This morning, we were looking forward to the next lesson in our music unit, ‘Weather’. This week’s focus was sunshine! We began with scarves, listening to ‘Walking on Sunshine’, Katrina and the Waves, whilst following the patterns on screen to move our scarves in time to the music. https://youtu.be/wfsTzmrxRtM We then listened to two more songs about sunshine: ‘You are my Sunshine’, sung by Christina Perri, and ‘Here comes the Sun’ by the Beatles. We moved to this music and discussed how we moved differently as the dynamics, tempo, pitch and mood of the pieces differed. Lots of the children recognised ‘You are my Sunshine’, sharing that this is a song that their grown-ups sing to them at bedtime. This was such a lovely discussion. We decided to learn Makaton signs for this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ith3IBDkAJk Finally, we used Chrome Music Lab (https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Kandinsky/) to compose our own sunny music. We decided that sunny music should be happy music and enjoyed drawing a picture which translated into sounds. We experimented with pitch (by changing whether a drawing was high or low on the page), length (by changing the length of the strokes) and instruments (by changing the colours at the bottom). We were especially delighted to discover that drawing a circle would make a face appear, creating a voice sound! Once satisfied with our final piece, we enjoyed listening along and dancing to our sunny music. We love our Friday music lessons!
In RE, it was time to hear one more story that Jesus heard, the story of Jonah and the Whale. We read two different retellings of this Bible story and thought about some of the key themes: obedience, courage, faith in God, forgiveness and saying sorry. We considered why Jonah may not initially have listened to God; we thought that he may have felt scared of going to Ninevah, which we sympathised with. We thought that the most important part of the story was when Jonah said sorry to God and asked for his forgiveness. We enjoyed reading about Jonah’s subsequent bravery as he travelled to Ninevah and the joy that the people of Ninevah shared after asking for God’s forgiveness. We thought that one of the important Christian teachings in this story is to listen to God and have faith; He always has a plan. We then worked together to create collaborative Jonah and the Whale artwork.
This week’s PSED ‘Keeping Safe’ lesson was entitled, ‘Safe indoors and outdoors’. We explored a picture book about Harold the giraffe, who is being a safety detective. In this book we saw Harold looking at a lot of different, everyday things, inside and outside, to investigate whether they are safe or unsafe, and how to make sure we can keep safe around these things. For example: in the kitchen (kettle of boiling water, cookers and pans, sockets, matches); the bathroom (slippery surfaces, hot water taps); in the countryside (Foxgloves, stinging nettles, barbed wire, broken glass). Whilst we recognise these dangers, we know that they do not stop us from having a bath or going for a walk! We realised it is all about how we keep safe around dangers to minimise risks – doing things for ourselves to keep safe from harm as well as knowing which adults are responsible for keeping us safe.
Yet another busy week draws to a close! Next week, we shall be celebrating Lunar New Year, as well as going for a walk around our local area on Tuesday afternoon. I hope that you all have a lovely weekend.
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
