Well it’s here! The last day of term for 2021-22.
You’ve all had an amazing year!
I thought it would be nice to share some wonderful highlights.
Click here to reflect back on your Reception year.
I hope you all have a happy and healthy summer break.
This week has been a ‘chilled’ week compared to last week. We’ve enjoyed spending some quality time in the areas and making the most of our last days in Reception.
Again, we’ve been super impressed with their amazing writing! They love talking about what they can see and writing sentences about the interesting pictures. For example, this was Thursday’s ‘weird and wonderful’ picture…
Yesterday, they enjoyed getting to know their new class teachers and exploring in the Year 1 classroom. Mrs Palmer sent me some lovely photos of them having fun in the sun.
In this week’s Living and Learning session, we talked about keeping safe around medicine and harmful substances. We sorted items that we can and can’t put into our bodies.
Home-Link Challenge
I hope you all have a happy and healthy weekend.
See you next week for your final week in Reception.
Today, Reception enjoyed a day out to Tropical World.
They were super excited when they saw the coach!
Their behaviour was impeccable. It was a pleasure taking them all on their first school trip.
In the morning, we enjoyed looking at all of the different animals/creatures in Tropical World. At lunchtime, we sat and had a picnic in the Tropical World gardens. After lunch, on the way to our workshop, we ran off some energy in Roundhay Park.
Click here to watch some of the highlights from our trip.
Well done to all the children for showing resilience and determination in their races! Thank you to everybody who came and supported the children at our Sports Day.
Sports day
Tuesday 05 June at 9.15am
Your child needs to come to school in their PE kit and wearing suitable footwear.
Please could you ensure your child has a named water bottle and a cap/hat at school; it would also be useful if you could apply sun cream before your child comes to school.
Tropical World
Wednesday 06 June
Your child needs to come to school in their school uniform.
They’ll need a packed lunch and named water bottle.
PE
Thursday 07 June
Your child needs to come to school in their PE kit.
Our focus book has been ‘The Night Pirates’ by Peter Harris. On Monday, we found a note at the back of the book. The note said:
Look carefully outside and you will find…
We looked outside and found a bottle buried in our sandpit with a letter inside. 
We talked about the skills/qualities we would need to join Tom on an adventure. Here are some of the skills/qualities that the children came up with:
We then had a go at writing our letters to Tom. We talked about using ‘Dear’ or ‘To’ at the beginning of our letters.
We’ve also been super busy completing this week’s chilli challenges.
We created our own treasure maps.
We cleaned the ocean of plastic to help look after our sea creatures.
We investigated magnetic and non-magnetic materials.
In maths, we have deepened our understanding of the counting system and recapped some key skills:
Every morning, we write a sentence about a picture. We’re super proud of our writing skills!
Thank you!
Finally, thank you to all the parents/carers that came to one of our learning journey drop ins. It was lovely to welcome you all into the classroom. We hope you enjoyed looking through your child’s books and talking to your child about everything they have enjoyed/achieved during their first year at school.
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Last Friday, ZS’s Dad came to help us spruce up our outdoor planters.
In RE, we talked people who are special to us and why some people are particularly special to us.
In Literacy, we used a map to locate seaside towns. We looked at some photographs of Scarborough and talked about the things we might see at the seaside that we don’t see in Leeds.
FH – The seaside town has a lighthouse but Leeds doesn’t.
OR – We don’t have boats but the seaside does. We have boats to travel on the sea.
DA – The seaside has little beach huts.
LS – The beach might have jellyfish.
LW- The beach has water but Wetherby and Leeds don’t have water.
The glorious weather has enabled us to spend lots of time learning outside. Please continue to make sure you apply sun lotion to your child before school. This stops us from missing any learning time. Thank you to everyone that has done that this week.
Click here to watch us learning outside.
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I can’t believe it’s the last half-term. Where has this school year gone?
We’ve dived straight into our new topic, Let’s make a splash!
This half-term, we’ll be thinking about days at the beach – we even have our own beach! We’ll investigate floating and sinking, locate seaside towns on a map, talk about what we see at the seaside that we don’t see in Leeds and talk about seaside holidays of the past.
This week, we’ve been reading Sharing a Shell by Julia Donaldson. The children were great at sequencing the key events from the story.
We used adjectives to describe what our favourite character looks like.
In Maths, we’ve been using the rekenreks to help us with our perceptual and conceptual subitising skills. We know to make sure all the beads are at the right-hand side of the rack. This is called the ‘ready position’. We then get ready, set and push using the ‘one finger push’ method.
With sports day just around the corner, we thought we should start practising.
This week’s chilli challenges have been very successful. Lots of children worked really hard to complete all of the challenges.
We drew sea creatures with wax crayons and watched what happened when we painted over it with a blue wash.
Exploring in our new role-play area.
We made signs to put up in our beach.
We used our observational skills to draw shelfs.
Diary dates
20, 21 & 24 June – Learning journey drop ins
23 June – Moving from Reception to Year 1 parent meeting
5 July – Sports Morning
6 July – Trip to Tropical World – look out for the letter!
7 July – Reserve Sports Morning
8 July – PTA Summer Fair
This half-term is very busy!
Please make sure you’ve noted down the events.
Reminder!
Please don’t forget to sign up to one of our learning journey drop ins. A letter went out on Wednesday.
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This week, it’s been a fun filled Jubilee themed week!
In literacy, there was a lot of laughter when reading The Queen’s Knickers. The children designed a new pair of knickers for the Queen to wear on different occasions.
The Queen will wear these knickers…
MC – when she goes on holiday
HD – wherever she wants to go
DA – when she goes to the park
OR – when she goes to the United Kingdom
Florence – when she sees a rainbow
JD – when she walks her dogs
SF – when she goes to a birthday party
HN – when she goes to the beach
RF – when she goes to Burger King
Take a look at their super designs!
At the creative table, the children enjoyed making the Queen’s Guards.
On Tuesday, we learnt that the Queen has had her portrait painted over 130 times! So we thought we would add to this collection and draw our own portraits.
Throughout the week, we’ve been practising the National Anthem ready to sing at our Jubilee party. Click here to watch us.
Butterflies
Over the past few weeks we’ve been closely observing the life cycle of our caterpillars. From Monday, our butterflies finally started to emerge! Today, we had fun releasing them.
Jubilee party
Finally…
I hope you all have a happy and healthy half-term with family and friends. Don’t forget to send us photographs of what you get up to. See yo all on Monday 06 June for your final half-term in Reception.
Our school vision is to be a happy and healthy place to achieve and believe. This week, we’ve seen so many children believe in themselves and achieve in many areas of their learning.
Even when things were a bit tricky, they persevered and achieved.
Well done Reception!
In maths, we built on our previous skills to compare attributes and quantities. Through practical activities and games, we thought carefully about which number is more or less. We used linear number tracks to play games that encouraged us compare numbers that are far apart, near and next to each other. (For example, 10 is a lot more than 2 but 5 is only 1 more than 4.)
In the maths area, we continued to explore number bonds to 10. We used part-whole model plates to support our learning.
In literacy, we used our actions to recap Walking through the Jungle. We had a go at writing our own story. Before writing our stories, we made a list of other rainforest animals. We also thought about how they might move through the jungle.
Check out what else we’ve been up to!
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Gary the giraffe has made some number 10 towers. Can you work out the number bonds he has made?
Next week, we’ll be having a fun-filled week of Jubilee activities!
Have a lovely weekend.