Reception w/b 9th December
Date: 13th Dec 2024 @ 4:49pm
It has been a week full of Christmas cheer in Reception! The festive season is inspiring so many exciting opportunities for play, learning and fun.
It has been our final week of phonics for the term and we have all been working on our Set 1 special friends. The children have worked really hard in these sessions – the concept of ‘Special Friends’ (e.g. ‘s’ and ‘h’ together make ‘sh’) is tricky but the children really have managed very well. We hope that the ‘How to Help’ videos will be helpful with reinforcing this concept at home. It was just a joy and a delight to complete phonics assessments with the children and to observe their confidence and pride in their amazing progress. I am so looking forward to sharing more information with you next week and celebrating these achievements.
In maths, we have been exploring composition by focusing on the concept of ‘wholes’ and ‘parts’. By investigating our own bodies and familiar toys, we have explored the fact whole things are often made up of smaller parts and that a whole is, therefore, bigger than its parts. For example, a trunk is a part, an elephant is the whole. A stem is a part, the apple is the whole. Key language in this area can be tricky; clarity around a ‘whole’ and how it is different from a ‘hole’ needed to be made explicit, using gesture to support this. We have then started to look at a Part-Whole Model, exploring the parts that can be made from the whole Numberblocks. For example, ‘2 is a part, 3 is a part, the whole is 5’. This is helping us to build firm foundations for later calculation strategies and develop fluency in knowledge of number bonds. One particular Numberblocks episode supports this concept: ‘The Whole of Me’. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08dr1l3/numberblocks-series-1-the-whole-of-me
Our adult led literacy task has also had an assessment purpose, as we challenged the children to independently write some Christmas CVC words. All children were so keen to have their turn at completing this task and they have all amazed us. The use of Fred Fingers to segment and the careful letter formation that we have observed is just wonderful. This writing is now proudly on display. In our whole class sessions, we have been working together to read and write some Christmas sentences e.g. ‘the hat is red’ when looking at a Santa hat. A particular favourite was ‘I am full up.’ when looking at a picture of a Christmas dinner! In our literacy lessons, we have therefore been recapping our red word ‘I’ as well as introducing a new red word ‘the’. Later in the week, we introduced the red words ‘to’ and ‘love’ to help us to start writing our Christmas cards. We can’t wait to bring these home next week!
At the beginning of the week, we thoroughly enjoyed watching the Key Stage 1 Nativity. It was wonderful to see those familiar faces retelling a story we now know so well but from a new perspective. Well done Key Stage 1. This clear understanding of the Nativity has really helped us in our RE sessions. The children have had such wonderful thoughts to share about the meaning of Christmas and the birth of such a very special baby.
We have also enjoyed working on our gross motor skills using balloons in PE. In Forest School, lots of us were busy making Christmas tree decorations using log slices. Of course, we have also enjoyed lots of choosing time and Christmas has definitely inspired lots of our favourite activities, as the photos show.
What a wonderful week it has been! We are already looking forward to our final week together before Christmas, which will be full of fun such as Christmas parties, Christmas dinner, crafts and baking. It is a magical time of year in Reception!
I hope that you all have a lovely weekend. I shall look forward to our Christmas party on Monday afternoon; children are invited to wear their own party clothes on this day and so do not need to wear PE kit.
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
