Reception w/b 8th January
Date: 11th Jan 2024 @ 5:39pm
A very warm welcome back and wishing you all a Happy New Year. It has been just wonderful to begin a new term with the children this week and such a joy to observe how delighted they were to see their friends after the break.
We ‘hit the ground running’ with our phonics sessions and were very pleased with how well the children had retained their sounds. You may find that your child is now in a new phonics group following our end of term phonics assessments; the children have worked simply beautifully in these groups, impressing their phonics teachers throughout the week. Over the next few weeks, we shall be consolidating our Set 1 sound knowledge and really focusing on reading and writing words. Please read the ‘How to help at home’ document to find out the sounds your child has focused on this week. Next week, we shall also begin our more formalised guided reading groups. We are very grateful for your support with reading at home and the benefits of the children reading their book at least three times at home are evident in their progress.
In our NCETM Mastering Number sessions, we have continued to use our subitising (speedy spotting skills) for increasingly complex arrangements of dots. Describing sub-groups within these arrangements has also helped us to consolidate our knowledge of part-whole relations e.g. ‘I can see 3 dots on the top and 1 dot on the bottom. 3 is a part, 1 is a part, the whole is 4’. Moving forward, the children will continue to use subitising skills to explore and deeply understand the composition of numbers within 10. This will support their increasing fluency with number bonds and help them to develop efficient and flexible calculation strategies in Key Stage 1 and beyond. This week’s related Numberblocks clip was taken from Series 3, Episode 1, Once Upon a Time. Towards the end of the week, we have used number tracks to play dice-based games, including Snakes and Ladders. Playing games with dice will consolidate the children’s understanding of the stable order of numbers and allow them to link the numbers on a track to the quantities on a die.
This week, there has also been a particular focus on children recognising numerals. Whilst the children are excellent at recognising numerals to 5, we are noticing some errors in recognising numerals to 10. For example, some children are able to count 8 objects but are finding it tricky to remember what the numeral 8 looks like. I have therefore included some suggestions for supporting the development of this skill in our ‘How to help at home’ document. This shall continue to be a focus in school also.
On Monday morning, we found a gift – it was small and wrapped in purple paper. The children predicted what could be inside, using clues such as the size, shape and weight of the gift to make a sensible guess. Upon opening the present, we discovered a toy bus. Who has seen a bus like this before? Have you been on one/ Where? What did you see out of the window? What job do buses have? Why are they so important? Where do you see them? What numbers do you know from buses? Where do they go? Where would like to go on a bus? Where do you like to sit on a bus? Some of the children noticed that one of our new books had a front cover with a photograph of a very similar-looking toy bus and predicted that our bus was the bus from this story: Naughty Bus by Jan and Jerry Oke. We therefore decided to read it and find out more. We were particularly interested in how the words had been written to reflect what was happening in the story e.g. the word ‘buildings’ was stretched so that the letters looked tall and thin like skyscrapers. Towards the end of the week, we were introduced to our story map and added corresponding Makaton signs to help us to learn to orally retell ‘Naughty Bus’. This will be so helpful in the weeks that follow as we complete different writing tasks related to the story. As we ease back into the new term, this week’s literacy activity was a word writing activity as we labelled images from the story. Next week, we shall look forward to writing some sentences. This week, there has also been a particular emphasis on recognising the red words: I, the, he, love. We understand that pre-Christmas fun and a two-week break means that children need time to consolidate this learning before we add a new weekly red word. Next week, there will be activities in the provision to help us to remember these 4 words. Practising the red words at home would be very beneficial also.
As the Naughty Bus is a toy that was given as a gift to the boy, we have been investigating toys within our Understanding the World learning. We used the Tees Valley Museums resources to explore information, photographs and videos of toys from the past, including:
- Acrobat (around 1900)
- Care Bear (1980s)
- Clockwork car (1930s)
- Betta Bilda construction set (1960s)
- China doll (late 1800s)
- Etch A Sketch (1960s)
- Rubik's Cube (1980s)
- Skipping rope (early -mid 1900s)
- Binatone video game console (about 1980)
We then played a voting game of ‘old or new’, using images of, for example, a modern bicycle and a bicycle from the past, to identify which was the newest item. Whilst we were confidently able to explain whether a toy was old or new, we noticed that most of the ‘old’ toys were toys that we would still like to play with now. It was most often the materials that would differ between the old and new toys as we all agreed that teddies, board games, rocking horses, cars etc. would all still be popular now! We particularly noticed that lots of modern toys are made with plastic.
The Naughty Bus also inspired our Forest School focus this week. We thought about the Naughty Bus sinking to the bottom of the pond and therefore decided to collect objects from around Forest School and predict whether they would float or sink. At the end of the session, we tested these objects by placing them into some warm water. We are super scientists!
Our music focus for this half term is ‘weather’ and, after a rather wet Christmas break, we decided to begin with a ‘rain’ focus. We learnt the song ‘Rain is falling down’ https://youtu.be/xwMHv5ho7Ic . We talked about the two verses of the song and that one is about the rain, and one is about the sun. We looked at a selection of percussion instruments and the children suggested which could be used for the rain sound and which could be used for the sun. The class then split in half, with each child having an instrument. One half of the class played the pulse of the song for the first verse (rain) and one for the second verse (sun). We then watched the marimba recital https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/melody-marimba-recital which shows Melody imagining jumping in puddles to the music. We thought about the ways in which the music matches the rain, and splashing in puddles, thinking about if the sounds were fast or slow, short or long sounds, loud or quiet? In the provision, the children then composed their own pieces of music about the rain.
In Spanish, we learnt the difference between the more formal ‘buenos días’ and the less formal and very popular ‘hola’. We have been using our knowledge throughout the week to answer the register.
In PE with Mrs McAree, we concluded our ‘Multiskills’ unit with a focus on balance. As the photos show, this was such fun, especially travelling whilst balancing equipment on our bodies!
Our RE focus for this term shall be stories that Jesus heard and told. We began this week’s lesson by discussing our favourite stories. We wondered whether Jesus listened to stories. Why did he not hear the stories of Elmer, The Gruffalo or The Very Hungry Caterpillar? Which stories did he listen to? We looked in the Bible, noticing all of the pages before the story of the birth of Jesus. This is the Old Testament which is comprised of many stories that Jesus heard when he was young. This week, we enjoyed the story of Moses in the bulrushes. We asked: How would you have felt if they had been the princess finding the baby? We discussed what Christians may learn from these stories: God is always with us, God is faithful, God has a plan, God protects us, God listens and we can trust God. In the provision, the children enjoyed using their fine motor skills to weave baskets.
To conclude our week, we enjoyed another No Outsiders lesson focused on the story ‘Blue Chameleon’ by Emily Gravett. This story helped us to celebrate that everyone is different in our class and we can make friends with anyone. We can absolutely be friends with someone who is different from us. We moved around the carpet area, pairing up with a new friend each time to notice differences between us and celebrate the fact that we are friends. We then enjoyed an activity where we were given two chameleons, colouring each one differently and thinking carefully about what they may say to each other.
Congratulations Reception on a superb start to the term. I can’t wait to discover the adventures we will enjoy through our Naughty Bus topic!
I hope that you all have a lovely weekend and I shall look forward to seeing you on Monday.
With best wishes,
Miss Witham
