Reception Class News

Week 5 – Superheroes

Posted on Sunday 05 February 2023 by Mr Roundtree

What a fantastic week we have had in reception. We have continued with our focus book Supertato but focused more on superheroes.

The children decided that they wanted to build a city for their superhero to live in. They thought carefully about what they wanted their city to have. We saw some amazing bridges!

This week we learnt more about Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi is also known as the princess of polka dots as she loves to add dots to her art creations. Yayoi has created sculptures and many different paintings. She has even used people as her canvas! We decided that we wanted to create some artwork inspired by this amazing artist. Check out some of our dotty designs.

There was an emergency in the kitchen this week! Julie came to see us to tell us that all the peas had escaped from the freezer! We thought this must be the work of the evil pea so we thought carefully about what we could do to find him. We decided that we would make some wanted posters so everyone at school could help us to find him.

A huge thank you for everyone who joined us for our funky fingers stay and play session on Friday. We loved sharing our classroom with everyone and hope you did too.

We have parents evening next week on Tuesday and Thursday evening. If you haven’t yet made an appointment please come and speak to me so we can arrange a time.

Mrs Payne

Week 4 – Supertato

Posted on Sunday 29 January 2023 by Mr Roundtree

This week our focus book is Supertato! We have been learning more about different fruits and vegetables and how they can help us to follow a healthy diet. We really enjoyed listening to the story and then adding actions for the different characters. In the classroom evil pea had been busy and had trapped lots of different fruit and vegetables onto our writing table. We wrote speech bubbles so they could get some help.

We decided that we would like to create our own Supertato. We carefully choose different materials and thought carefully about how we could make them stick to a potato!

The evil pea was causing so much trouble in the classroom we decided  to build some traps so we could catch the pea! It was a tough job but we worked together and made some amazing traps.

This week we have learnt more about primary and secondary colours. We investigated what happened when you mixed two primary colours together.

 

Dates for your diary:

Friday 3 February –  funky fingers stay & play. We hope you can all join us in the classroom to discover more about how we build muscle strength in out hands.

W/B 6 February – early years writing zoom. A pre recorded zoom presentation will be sent out to all families discussing writing in the early years setting.

As always please keep reading at home. The children love sharing their e-books with you all.

Mrs Payne

Week 4 – The Magic Paintbrush

Posted on Sunday 22 January 2023 by Mr Roundtree

Happy New Year!

This week in Reception we have been learning more about the Lunar New Year. We discovered how people across the world will be having new year celebrations and that 2023 is the year of the Rabbit! We were particularly interested in how dragons featured not only in our focus book but in lots of the celebrations. We created our own dragons and even learnt to dance like a dragon in our own parade.

We wrote good luck messages for the year ahead and build great walls to show our representations of the Great wall of China!

Bex Rayner

Thank you to everyone for all of the amazing sponsorships which allowed this great visit to take place. we were so excited to meet Bex and to learn more about what it is like to be a football player. We loved taking part in the circuit training and even our very own Mrs Walton showed her football skills in the assembly.

As you all know we love reading in Reception and love sharing stories with others. On Wednesday Yr 5& 6 came down to share some special stories with us. It was so nice to hear other people read and we even showed off our new reading skills to them!

 

Ways to help at home:

  • Phase 3 phonics flashcards have been sent home. Please keep reading together to gain confidence
  • Writing words together
  • Daily reading using e-books. If anyone is having any problems logging in please let me know.

Mrs Payne

Week 2 – animal fact books

Posted on Friday 13 January 2023 by Mr Roundtree

We have had great fun exploring ice and learning more about different animals this week. We used different cutting tools to create ice sculptures and discovered that the more we held the ice pieces the smaller they became.

We created igloos in our construction area using different building materials and snowflake designs on pegboards. “It is tricky to make the band go around the peg. My fingers are working hard” Aurelia.

We love reading in Reception. We enjoy exploring different books. This week we learnt more about fiction and non-fiction books. We sorted books from our reading corner into two piles and then used the contents page to help us find specific information.

We can’t wait to see everyone in our classroom for our phonics lesson on Monday 16 January. Please come to the office for 9am and then we can start learning together.

Welcome back!

Posted on Sunday 08 January 2023 by Mr Roundtree

Hello!

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas break and are looking forward to an amazing 2023. I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you for all of our lovely Christmas cards and gifts.

This week our focus book has been Lost and Found. We have used this to think about the weather in different places around the world and how different animals live in different places. Whilst outside we discovered some signs of Winter. We discussed how we thought the ice got there and what would need to happen for it to change into water.

As we read through our story we decided that we would like to make some of our own penguins. We used a range of different materials to create different parts of the penguins.

The more we read about the penguin in the story the more we wanted to learn. Harry asked “how tall is a penguin in real life?” we decided to find out and create our own real life sized penguins. We created an Emperor, Rockhopper and Macaroni penguin. Can you believe an Emperor penguin can be 115cm tall! We then used our real life sized penguins to find out if we were taller or shorter than the different penguins.

On Monday 16 January 9- 9:30 we will be holding our next stay and play session. This time we will be focusing on phase 3 phonics.

Things you could do to help with learning at home:

  • letter formation
  • blending sounds
  • talking about things in the local environment.

Mrs Payne

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Posted on Friday 23 December 2022 by Mr Roundtree

What a busy final week of 2022 we have had in reception. We have loved all of the Christmas activities that linked in with our Nativity and the Christmas story.

We made our very own Christmas lunches at the creation table. Using our hands we created different food items and thought carefully about shapes and sizes. Our real Christmas lunch was amazing! we designed table coverings and crowns to make the lunch extra special.

 

In reception we love our daily poetry sessions. Here is our poem from this week. We hope you enjoy it.

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I would like to say huge thank you for all of your support this term. The children are working so hard both in school and at home. It is lovely to see and hear all about home learning.

We hope you all have an amazing Christmas break and enjoy lots of family time together. Thank you to everyone for our lovely Christmas things.

Mrs Payne

Week 6 – The Jolly Christmas Postman

Posted on Friday 09 December 2022 by Mr Roundtree

It has been a busy week in Reception! Our book this week was all about the jolly postman taking special Christmas gifts to everyone. We decided to write our own postcards to send to people we care about.

As part of our creative time we made our own stamps. We thought about why stamps are important and looked at lots of different designs.

We have used our printing skills to make our own pieces of wrapping paper. We used different items to print with including potatoes! We enjoyed counting how many of each shape we had included and also recognising different colours.

On

On Monday we learnt more about Christingles. We discovered what the different parts of the Christingle represent. We made our own Christingles ready for our church service later in the week.

On Wednesday we had our first visit to church. We had a lovely walk looking for signs of Winter on the way. When we arrived at church we had a look at the building and found a special stable in the corner which reminded us of the Christmas Nativity Story. We all felt that it was a very special service.

We hope that you all enjoyed our Christmas Nativity production “It’s a Party” We have loved learning the songs and working with year 1 and 2 to create a super show. Thank you to everyone for all of your help and support.

Things to remember:

On the 12 December everyone is welcome to come into Reception to see what learning we have been doing this term. Learning Journeys and floor books will be out for everyone to have a look through. We hope you can join us from 3:30.

 

Week 5 – Owl Babies

Posted on Friday 02 December 2022 by Mr Roundtree

We have seen lots of signs of Winter this week in Reception. We were very excited to find ice in our outdoor area and wondered how it got there.

Our focus story this week has been Owl Babies. We have sequenced the story remembering the repeated phrases. We have enjoyed learning more about nocturnal animals and when and where we might see them. We used different drawing pencils to draw them and even used our phonics to try writing their names.

A big thank you to everyone for working hard at home with phonics. The children are working so hard with their segmenting and blending skills. I am sure you will agree we are all fantastic readers! We have been using these skills outside with our phonics balls. Can you read the word and then send it down the tunnel?

We love outdoor learning in Reception. We enjoy exploring all the different activities and creating our own challenges. In our outside construction we decided to create a roller coaster for the cars! We had to think about how the cars would travel through the tubes.

We are very excited to show everyone our Nativity play next week. Thank you to everyone who has brought in costumes and helped us to learn songs and lines. It is going to be amazing!

Week 4 – How to catch a star

Posted on Friday 25 November 2022 by Mr Roundtree

In our maths sessions this week we have been investigating the number 5. We have been using part whole models to explore different parts that come together to make a whole. We enjoyed creating 5 in different ways with linking cubes.

Following on from our learning around the Houses of Parliament we looked at some pieces of artwork by Monet. Monet created images of the Houses of Parliament at different points during the day. We really liked how all the colours blended together. We decided to use oil pastels to create our own pieces of inspired artwork.

Thank you to everyone who has brought their outfits in for the FS/KS1 Nativity. Please can all outfits be in school by Monday 28 November.

Mrs Payne

Week 3 – Nursery rhyme week

Posted on Friday 25 November 2022 by Mr Roundtree

We love nursery rhymes in Reception. This week our learning has linked to lots of different nursery rhymes. We used our measuring skills to make cups of tea for Polly. We built Humpty a new wall that was a little safer than his old one! We then compared the heights of our walls to see which one was the tallest and shortest. We sizzled sausages on our camp fire and even had wriggly teddy beds jumping out of the bed!

Have you ever drawn using charcoal? This week we used charcoal to create our observational drawings of an old suitcase. The suitcase didn’t look like any of our cases we have at home. We looked carefully at the different features and how we might include them in our drawings. We used smudging to add extra effects.

Thank you to everyone who helped us raise awareness of anti bullying week and Children in Need. We had lots of discussions around what bullying is and why it is so important to respect each other and celebrate our differences.

A big thank you to everyone who joined us for our Marvellous Maths session on Thursday. It was fantastic to share our learning with you all. We will be holding more stay and play sessions throughout the year and looking forward to welcoming everyone into Reception.