Reception class news

Reception class, a huge well done for completeting our last week of learning this term. Whilst we have missed being a family together in the classroom, learning alongside each other, we have kept the love of learning going all term with our daily phonics, literacy and numeracy and other areas of development. That is quite an achievement and one that you and your families should be extremely proud of. I know I am.

Lets recap on our week...

In our literacy development we received a message in a bottle for Tom from Captain Patch. We think he is still a little upset about Tom and the girl pirates stealing his treasure as he asked for it back! When he told his mum, she said he needed to steal some more! He asked if Tom would like to go on an adventure with him. So, as we have have worked on characters this term, we quickly slipped into the character of Tom and thought about what our responses might be, which we put into an ideas bubble to support our writing. After a quick reminder about the layout of letters which we looked at last term, when we read the Jolly Postman, we decided on an informal letter style. We have used our 'hold a sentence' strategy to support us with this. We have practiced saying the sentence we want to write, counted out the number of words in it, made a note at the side and then structured our sentence with word spaces. This has helped us enormously understand how to construct a good sentence and increased our confidence in becoming independent writers.

We know that there are different forms of communication and styles of writing, so we finished our week with being a bit crafty! Don't tell our grown ups, but we have spent a little bit of time carefully making a valentines card to tell them how much we love them. We made lots of little hearts, which we then stuck together on top of some drawn stalks to make them look like a bunch of flowers. In class we discussed what we knew about Valentines day and why people might like to celebrate it. I hope they like them, they were made with such love and care.

It has definitely been a games week, this week in our mathematical development, as we have consolidated our knowledge of the number ten and number bonds to ten. We have been rather inventive and made our games which has given us the opportunity to practice some of our of practical and mathematical skills.

Our first game was called 10 hunt! Our adults hid ten identical objects around the home and we had to find then one by one and put them on the ten frame. As we placed each new find on the frame we had to practice saying how many we had and how many more we needed to make ten in a stem sentence for eg: I have 2 teaspoons and I need 8 more teaspoons to make 10 altogether.

Our second game we made was called 'Bonds to 10 memory game.' Using ten frames (11 in total) we drew counters on each one to represent the numbers 1-10 and made sure we had two frames that represented five as we know that 5 and 5 make ten altogether. Once our ten frame cards were made we turned them face down on the table and played pairs. The winner was the person who matched up the correct number pairs (bonds) to make ten altogether. Again we practiced saying them in a stem sentences, recognising that the two parts made the whole number.

And finally, our last game 'Pots to ten' required lots of counting and labelling skills. First we had to find 11 containers and then label them 1-10, remembering to make two 5 pots. This required us to represent the numbers in the abstract form. Once our pots were labelled we had to find the correct number of objects to put in each pot to represent the labelled number. Wow , that meant we had to find 60 objects! Once all our pots were filled, we then played matching two pots together that the contents totalled ten altogether.

We have definitely consolidated this terms learning with those tasks, as well as become ace game makers!

Our PE session, as part of Physical Development, has been inspired by how well England are doing at cricket at the moment. In our explore part of the session we have rolled a ball across the floor using different parts of our body, our knees, elbows, foot and even our nose! Then whilst sitting on the floor we tried to see if we could roll our ball down different parts of our bodies, this was tricky as the ball kept falling off! In our practice section of the session we rolled the ball along the floor and ran after it to pick it up, like a fielder. we practiced doing this over short and long distances. And finally in our developing skills we played roll a ball skittles, when we rolled the ball to see how many skittles we could knock down at varying distances. In our cool down we thought about if someone in our house likes cricket or if they enjoyed watching cricket on the television at the moment?

In our Understanding the world development we completed our final session on birthdays, linked to history and why people celebrate them. We considered why people gave cards and made a birthday card for somebody in our household, this varied from a family member, a friend and even a toy! Our cards reflected our thoughts about that person's favourite things to make the birthday card special.

Following on from last week, where we explored life under the sea, we continued to look at and discuss the different creatures that live in the sea, then created our own sea creature, a jelly fish! This was great fun and a lovely way to finish off our theme for learning this term, Pirates and time travel around the oceans and seas.

Mrs Dale set us another fantastic coding activity this week. We had to hide a piece of treasure around the home or class and then write a set of instructions to be followed. It was important to make sure the instructions were clear. If the follower couldn't find the treasure we had to go back and debug any unclear instructions like a computer. Thank you Mr Dale, we have really enjoyed our unplugged coding this term.

In our music session, we have continued to learn some new songs from different cultures and practice known nursery rhymes through Charanga. Thank you Mrs swan for organising and delivering these sessions, it has been a joy to tune in and listen to all the singing at home.

And so as our week draws to a close, we can all take a collective deep breath and take some much needed time to recharge our batteries in the coming days. Hopefully it won't be too long before we are back together again.

Mrs Ward, Alex and Rachael