Reception w/b 6th May
Date: 10th May 2024 @ 4:14pm
What an absolutely wonderful week we have all enjoyed! We have been making the most of the glorious sunshine as we are so lucky at Brereton to have so many beautiful outdoor spaces to explore and enjoy – all the more beautiful in the sunshine. It is a sure sign that summer is on the horizon when we are able to take our story times outside to our story tree.
It has been another super week of learning new sounds in phonics and writing sentences with ever increasing independence. Due to next week’s Year 6 SATs involving some of our phonics teachers, next week’s phonics lessons shall be taught as whole class sessions. I have some new challenges up my sleeve for these sessions – I can’t wait!
In our maths lessons, we have started to explore a new strategy for solving addition calculations – adding by counting on. We have therefore used a number line – a good strategy to become familiar with before Year 1. We first learnt our ‘jumping on’ strategy, starting with a physical number line comprised of number tiles. For example, if adding 5 and 3, we knew to start on the number 5 tile. We then physically jumped along the number line by 3 jumps to land on 8: 5 + 3 = 8. As the week progressed, we moved to a paper number line, using the pencil to draw the jumps. In this case, we would circle the starting number (e.g. 5), then jump carefully (e.g. 3 jumps), before circling the number we landed on (8). We shall continue to explore this method next week. Marvellous mathematicians, indeed!
In English, we continued to write our finding stories, using our story friends, Opening Octopus, Build-up Bear, Problem Penguin and Ending Elephant, to help us to structure our stories. The children have expertly used the Star in the Jar story map to retell this story, innovating it by choosing a new main character. They orally retell and sign the story map with fantastic fluency, so it is no surprise that this has translated into beautifully written stories.
With Mrs McAree, we enjoyed our second Spanish lesson in our new unit ‘Transport’. So far, we have focused on the following phrases: El barco = The boat; El barco flota = The boat floats; El coche = The car; El aeroplano = The plane; El coche circula = The car drives; El aeroplano vuela = The plane flies. The children especially loved singing the song which includes all of these phrases!
In Forest School, Miss Jones showed us how to use nature to create ‘nature paintbrushes’. We attached leaves, wildflowers, grass etc. to sticks to create the paintbrushes and loved painting with them.
On Thursday morning, it was our turn for our class visit to St Oswald’s Church. We enjoyed such a beautiful walk in the spring sunshine and noticed yet more changes in nature, particularly the dandelion clocks, lots of butterflies and, just as we arrived at church, some bluebells. We were very pleased to see Reverend Sandi, who led a lovely service as she continues to help us to understand the elements of a church service. This time, Reverend Sandi explored the Bible story, Noah’s Ark, a story we explored in school in the spring term. The children loved watching the interactive and engaging story! Lots of children also noticed features of the church that we had explored in last week’s RE lesson, as well as recalling that the church is considered to be ‘God’s house’ and is a holy place for Christians. After our walk back from church, we enjoyed a drink in the shade before some time playing at the park. A super end to a super morning.
This focus on special and holy places has continued in our RE lessons. This week, Miss Jones has been teaching us all about Mosques, a holy place for Muslims. As part of this lesson, she showed us this video, helping us to understand more about Muslim places of worship. https://youtu.be/hg_CbiGE9kk
This week, we were introduced to the artist Kandinsky. Our work with Miss Jones, exploring colour mixing, made him the perfect artist to investigate. First, we revisited our knowledge of colour mixing, reminding ourselves of the primary colours (red, yellow and blue) which we can mix to make secondary colours (orange, green and purple). It would be useful to continue to explore this at home. We then looked at a range of Kandinsky’s artwork, discussing what we noticed and liked/disliked about each piece. There are endless interpretations of abstract art, making Kandinsky’s artwork such fun to explore and discuss. We particularly liked ‘Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles’ and have been creating our own artwork inspired by this piece. The children were just given the three primary colours (red, blue and yellow) so needed to use their colour mixing skills to create a range of colours and shades.
We ended the week with our class photograph…a ‘moment in time’ to capture our truly wonderful 23-24 Reception cohort.
A glorious week in glorious weather! I hope that you all have a lovely weekend and are able to enjoy some more sunshine.
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
