Reception w/b 7th November

Date: 11th Nov 2022 @ 5:18pm

All of the children in Reception have continued to thoroughly impress us this week – you are all superstars!

Our new phonics timetable has continued and the progress we are seeing is very pleasing. All of the phonics teachers have commented on the wonderful work they are seeing and we are all very proud of the children; as Mrs Warren would say, they have ‘blown our socks off’! Please look out for a Dojo message to find out the sounds your child has focused on this week. At the moment, we are particularly focusing on:

• Sound recognition – the RWI home videos and practising flashcards will help with this. Children are also keen to spot the sounds all around them.
• Letter formation – the handwriting sheets on our website are a good resource to help your child with this. They can be found in: teaching and learning – curriculum – reading – Read Write Inc. There is a sheet for each sound listed on this page.
• Oral blending – the best way to help your child to learn to blend is plenty of Fred talk!

Dough disco continues to be a hit as our morning starter. We can’t wait to see the influence of this activity as children continue to build their hand strength and develop their fine motor skills.

Our week of maths started with a focus on ‘four’ as we looked at the different ways that four blocks can be arranged. We really like the Numberblocks episode all about the number four to consolidate this understanding. For the remainder of our NCETM Mastering Number sessions, we have focused on ‘more’ and ‘fewer’. The sessions this week have focused on developing the innate skill of comparison of quantities as children have been encouraged to look carefully and use the language of comparison to describe sets of objects that they can see. Language has been a key focus, using ‘more than’ and ‘fewer than’ to describe how many objects there are in each set; ‘fewer than’ is used rather than ‘less than’ because the focus is on countable things. As shown on our topic web, our NCETM Mastering Number sessions are used in conjunction with the Numicon Firm Foundations scheme. This week, our focus has been ordering Numicon shapes. The children have each enjoyed working 1:1 with Miss Toft to complete her Numicon challenge! She first gave each child the ten Numicon shapes and asked them to order the shapes. Next, she swapped two of the shapes around and challenged the children to spot which shapes had been swapped. Finally, Miss Toft removed a shape so the children needed to identify which had been taken away. We are all marvellous mathematicians! As part of this scheme, we will also focus on a number a week. This week we have focused on the number one and have enjoyed the page in our number books – ‘one tall lighthouse’.

In our English sessions, our enthusiasm for ‘Juniper Jupiter’ has continued. We are now confidently orally retelling the story using our Talk for Writing style story map and actions. We can’t wait to film this to show you! This week, we have focused on understanding the vocabulary used in the story. We talked about the definitions of: kind, brave, sneaky, smart, lonely, sidekick, checklist, poster, audition, daunted, prepared, useless and sulk. We then encouraged the children to try and use some of these words during their play in the provision. Our second focus for the week has been to compose questions. After identifying some question words (what, when, where, why, how, who) we each suggested a question we would like to ask Juniper Jupiter. I wonder if we will soon have the chance to ask her these questions…

On Monday afternoon, we were introduced to the work of the artist Van Gogh. We enjoyed looking at a variety of landscape paintings and discussing the colours and shapes that we could see in the paintings. It was great to look at some of his paintings of cities as we would be creating our own city artwork – superhero skylines! We were especially inspired by his painting ‘Starry Night’. We used oil pastels to create our own skylines, imitating the swirling shapes used by Van Gogh. We then washed over the oil pastel with some watercolours. Finally, we used a collaging technique to create skyscrapers along the bottom of our pictures to finish our superhero skylines.

 On Tuesday, we launched our new My Happy Mind unit – celebrate. Celebrate is narrated by the character Charlie and is focused on teaching children the following: we all have things about us that are special, these are called character strengths; our character strengths help us to be our best; we feel great when we use our character strengths. The hook for this unit was the story ‘Charlie’s Rainbow Adventure’ which we enjoyed reading and discussing. Over the half term, we will complete several activities linked to this story.

In our Wednesday RE session, we began to think about the Church ahead of our visit. We thought about some of the symbols we may find there (e.g. a cross) and some features of a Church – we were especially amazed by stained glass windows. Visiting St Oswald’s Church on Thursday truly enriched this learning. The children were impeccably behaved throughout their walk to/from Church and during our time in Church. We enjoyed singing songs with some actions (‘Jesus’ love is very wonderful’ and ‘My Lighthouse’) as well as learning the children’s creed. We were then able to explore the Church and identify some features before we had a prayer. We were all then kindly given a biscuit and some juice to have in Church before returning to school. It will be wonderful to reflect on how our visit made us feel in next week’s RE lesson.

On Thursday, we enjoyed learning all about magnets with Mrs Edwards. It was exciting to test the magnets and perform some ‘magic tricks’ with them!

Today, we walked over to the flag pole with Year 1 and Year 2 to observe the silence at 11am. The children were very respectful and reflective and showed great maturity. This understanding of the importance of remembrance has been developed throughout the week. In Forest School, we created remembrance crosses inspired by poppies before coming together for some reflection and quiet thinking time. We have also worked together to create some collaborative artwork to show a field of poppies. We will remember them.

In order to be able to respectfully and reflectively observe the silence at 11am, we decided to move our PE session to the afternoon today. We very much enjoyed the chance to be outside, working on our balancing skills.

Of course, we have also been enjoying our provision time throughout the week. Some popular activities have included: making Numberblocks characters using multilink; dressing up to create a superhero play; using the outdoor construction to create vehicles for superheroes; lots of water play; mark making in flour; using playdough alongside a variety of playdough mats.

Another week into Autumn 2 also brought with it some more Nativity songs. We are now all singing: ‘Mary, Mary, what a surprise”, “Such a long way”, “We’d like to tell you a story”, “Down in the stable”, “Such a perfect moment” and “There’s a razzle and a dazzle”. Hopefully the children will treat you to some snippets of these songs!

I hope that you all enjoy a lovely weekend and I shall look forward to another wonderful week next week!

Miss Witham