Reception w/b 3rd March
Date: 7th Mar 2025 @ 5:28pm
What an exciting week we have had! We have especially enjoyed celebrating Shrove Tuesday and World Book Day.
Our World Book Day was, as it of course should be, all about books! We most certainly set a personal class record for the number of story times held in one day! Our day began with a whole school World Book Day assembly. The children loved showing their costumes to the school and looking at the costumes worn by the older year groups. We were amazed by all of the effort that had gone into these fabulous costumes to help the children to celebrate a love of books. Mrs Forrester had brought us an exciting present – a new book for our class. It was ‘The Wizard of Oz’, illustrated by Carly Gledhill. We enjoyed sharing this story and engaging in related provision enhancements throughout the day. Some favourites included mark making on tin foil (inspired by the Tin Man!), building the Emerald City, making scarecrows with nature; making a playdough yellow brick road; illustrating our own stories. In our carpet times, we especially thought about the characters and what it means to be wise, to show love, and to have courage. We read the stories ‘The Lion Inside’ and ‘Kind’ to make links to these qualities. After lunch, we enjoyed a lovely opportunity to snuggle up and share our favourite books with a friend – book reviews from our peers are often the most meaningful! Several children enjoyed the book shared by their partner so much that they were keen to buy this book or borrow it from the library for themselves. Another popular whole class activity was a game of ‘Guess the Book Character’. Children used actions or verbal clues to help their friends to guess the book character. We had a wonderful day and it is so joyful to see just how much the children love books! Thankfully, Miss Witham and Mrs McAree have avoided being stained red and blue for the weekend!
This week, we have also been exploring Shrove Tuesday. We learnt that Shrove Tuesday is celebrated on the Tuesday before Lent begins; Lent is a time when Christians are getting ready for Easter. In the past, people gave up food like eggs, milk and sugar at Lent so, the day before Lent began, they would use up all these foods by making pancakes. We learnt that the three ingredients in pancake batter are: flour, eggs and milk. The children noticed that Mr Wolf used the same ingredients when we read ‘Mr Wolf’s Pancakes’. We thoroughly enjoyed making pancake batter, whisking the ingredients together until we could see bubbles. Mrs McAree was our pancake expert who then cooked our pancakes and showed us how to flip them! We all enjoyed the chance to flip a spare pancake in a cool pan – super job, Reception! For a tasty treat, we were able to choose a topping for our pancake. Yummy! In our literacy lessons, we have been writing instructions for making pancakes, including a list of ingredients and equipment, and a bossy list of ‘what you do’. We are so impressed with the children’s growing confidence and independence when they are writing. We have added our recipes to our home corner, which have been very helpful as the children have included making and flipping pancakes into their role play.
On Monday, Brereton had a visit from Charlie from Read Write Inc. who was amazed by Reception’s hard work and brilliant progress with their reading and writing. She thinks that the children are all phonics experts! Well done, Reception. This week, we have been introducing and consolidating Set 2 and Set 1 special friends. We also started to write dictated sentences in our phonics lessons – wow! We hope that the children enjoyed sharing their books with you at home this week. In our second week of the half term, we have each read a new focus text in our guided reading time and the children have worked very hard.
In maths, our focus number song (5 Little Ducks) inspired us as we explored ‘taking away’ and recording subtraction number sentences. We began by exploring subtracting 1 as we sang the song e.g. 5 little ducks went swimming but only 4 came back: 5 – 1 = 4. We explored the subtraction sign and realised that the number sentence can be written exactly as we say the number story: 5 take away 1 is equal to 4. We also learnt that, as well as ‘take away’, we can also say ‘subtract’. We shall explore more mathematical language relating to subtraction over the coming weeks. We then progressed to taking away groups of ducks, rather than just one at a time. We practised instantly seeing (subitising) how many ducks remained, using our number bond knowledge to say how many had been taken away. This week of learning has also been a super opportunity to consolidate our understanding of the composition of numbers as we have investigated the numbers within 7 and part-whole relations (e.g. 7 is made of 5 and 2, 3 and 4, 6 and 1, 0 and 7…).
This week, we also had another numeral formation session, we practised forming our numeral of the week (3) by saying, “Around a tree, around a tree, that’s the way to make a 3!”
On Monday morning, Mrs McAree launched our new music unit, ‘Animals’. We listened to ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ by Rimsky-Korsakov, performed by violinist Katica Illenyi. We considered the tempo (which we learnt was the speed of the music) and moved to the music, matching our movements to the tempo. We then used a bee puppet to learn and sing the ‘Hickety Tickety Bumblee’ game before enjoying two final songs: ‘Here is the Beehive’ and ‘The Bees Go Buzzing’.
Monday was the perfect day to have an ‘animals’ focus as it was World Wildlife Day! Some of the children had talked about the bird feeders that they had seen Jojo and Gran Gran make and so they made a special request that this be our Forest School focus. The children are still fascinated by birds after last half term’s activities! These bird feeders were made with apples, threading sticks through the apples for the birds to rest on, and poking bird seed into the flesh of the apple. It was a beautifully sunny morning in the forest!
Our PSED session was entitled ‘Looking after my special people’. We thought about our families and the people that we love. We asked: Who looks after your family? We know that adults look after children but we wondered whether there were any ways that we could help to look after our families. We thought about scenarios such as: a sibling is upset, a grown up is feeding a baby, a family member is looking for something that is lost, a family member is feeling poorly. In each situation, we also remembered our safety rules e.g. when thinking about helping somebody who feels poorly, we remembered that we should never touch the medicine – that is for grown-ups. Instead, we could ask if they need something (e.g. tissues or a blanket) or maybe read them a story.
To begin our RE session, we explored our Chatterbox and the items it contained. Inside, we discovered: a cross, an angel, a donkey, some bread, a card with three crosses on the front, a palm cross, and a recipe for hot cross buns. This prompted conversation and questions which led us to the conclusion that we will be learning about Easter this half-term. This week, our particular focus was Palm Sunday. We watched the following video: https://youtu.be/lTmbTuutBgg. We then made our own palm leaves to wave as we sing along to We Have a King who Rides a Donkey next week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJqFuiafDf8. We will continue to explore Palm Sunday and the events of Holy Week across the half term, exploring different elements of Holy Week in more detail within each lesson.
In our PE lesson, we worked on our dodging skills. We had a ‘fruit salad’ theme as we tried our very best to dodge past the ‘chef’ to avoid being caught! We were just delighted with the kindness, patience and encouragement that the children demonstrated in this rather exciting game.
Another week full to the brim with super progress, hard-work and fun! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend and we hope that you are able to share some lovely books together at home.
Miss Witham
