Reception w/b 4th March
Date: 8th Mar 2024 @ 9:16pm
Well, it was absolutely delightful to share the Mothering Sunday service with so many of you this morning alongside another lovely (if slightly chilly!) 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. We especially enjoyed singing, dancing and signing to the songs. We also know how to sign ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ using Makaton! 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 this morning 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! Finally, thank you to the PTA for this morning’s lovely gift room, which Reception enthusiastically attended upon our return to school.
Our week in literacy began with learning the story map for ‘The Something’, using Makaton signs to help us to retell the story. Embedding the structure and language of the story is an important step in the process of innovating a retelling of the story which we shall write next week. We noticed that our losing story is written in 4 parts, which led to the introduction of our Story Friends: Opening Octopus, Build-Up Bear, Problem Penguin and Ending Elephant. These four story friends formed the four planning circles for our story plans. We changed aspects of the story ‘The Something’, using drawings to represent our ideas; these plans will help us to write, next week. For example, instead of Dan losing his red ball in the hole, Miss Witham’s story is about Beth losing her green car in the pond! With Miss Jones, we have also been thinking about rhymes. We have been isolating and then ‘bouncing’ the end of words (e.g. red-ed-ed-ed, bed-ed-ed-ed) to help us to hear the rhyme. Rhyming is often challenging so would be a wonderful skill to continue to practise at home through rhyming games and stories.
In maths, our focus on subtraction has continued and we are becoming increasingly confident all the time with recording subtraction number sentences. We especially enjoyed knocking down skittles to create a subtraction number sentence! Whilst we shall move on to exploring doubles, even numbers and shapes for the remainder of the half term, addition and subtraction shall continue to be woven into all maths lessons and shall be revisited in Summer 1.
Our Spanish lesson focused on learning five new colours: blanco = white; violeta = purple; naranja = orange; marrón = brown; negro = black. We also learnt the Makaton signs for these colours, to help us to remember both the Spanish colour names and Makaton colour signs. Finally, we revised the five colours learnt in last week’s lesson: rojo = red; amarillo = yellow; azul = blue; verde = green; gris = grey.
It was a beautifully sunny afternoon in Forest School, making bird feeders with Miss Jones. At one station, we were spreading margarine on a cardboard tube/egg box and then rolling this in bird seed before hanging the tube on a branch. At another station, we threaded Cheerios onto pipe cleaners and then tied these to the trees. At the final station, we were using oranges that had been cut in half, scraping out some of the fruit and then filling them with bird seed. What a wonderful way to learn to look after our local wildlife! I am sure that the birds have been grateful for these bird feeders during some rather chilly temperatures in these early spring days.
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 reading ‘Zee Zee the Zebra’ the book written Mrs Winward, our Patron of Reading. She had filmed a video for us, explaining her process in writing, editing, and publishing a book. This was very inspiring ahead of next week’s innovated story writing focus! Miss Witham then shared a Winnie the Pooh story, all about buzzing bees. This therefore was the perfect opportunity to launch 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’. We then timetabled plenty of opportunities 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. Throughout the rest of the morning, in addition to some lovely choosing time, many children kindly allowed us to share their favourite story for a whole class storytime. Before lunch there was time to share some poems, with Spike Millingan’s ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’ continuing to be especially popular! In the afternoon, Miss Jones shared read some examples of number books, such as ‘Jingle Jangle Jungle’ and ‘Ten Little Dinosaurs’. Many of us enjoyed making our own number stories. Throughout the week, we have also enjoyed using puppets to retell traditional tales, using our cutting skills to create puppets of the characters from some of our favourite stories, and exploring our focus author, Julia Donaldson. Of course, we absolutely loved the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party lunch! Thank you so much to Mrs Downing and Mrs Moreton for this exciting experience.
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
