Reception Class News 11:06:21

Welcome back to a new term Reception Class.

It has been lovely to see you all enthuastic about our new theme for learning: Minibeasts.
Even before we started our story book, you could tell me loads of interesting facts for us to build upon in the following weeks.

Let' share this week's learning...

In our Communication and Language Development, we listened to the story 'Caterpillar Butterfly' by Vivian French. We discovered that finding caterpillars in the garden is dependant on where you live, the types of plants in your garden and what the weather is like. Through the story, we have explored new words and developed our understanding that the different stages of a caterpillar and butterfly are called a life-cycle.

In our Understanding of the World Development, to help us understand the life cycle of a butterfly in more depth, we moved our bodies to act out each stage. Our classroom was a hive of activity as we changed our bodies to represent the egg, caterpillar, pupa and butterfly. We also watched a video depicting the whole life cycle and created our own life cycle using four pictures.

We have been great minibeast detectives in the garden, looking for butterfly eggs under leaves, so far we have found aphids under leaves, but no butterflies. Our blue geraniums are attracting a lot of bees which has been facinating to watch as they go into each flower head searching for nectar. We have also managed to spot a few ladybirds by the bug hotel, although they are a little resitant to being observed, they keep flying away!

We also explored why worms are an important mini beast in our gardens. After reading 'wiggling worms at work' by Wendy Pfeffer, we learnt worms are like nature's ploughs, as they loosen the soil as they wiggle along, creating tunnels, which allows the rainwater and air to get into the soil. This helps the roots of plants to drink up the rainwater and grow. We also discovered that worms don't have teeth, so when they swallow soil, sand and small stones in their gizzard grind the soil. They also digest leaf and plant bits in the soil and pass pellets out of their tails which make good plant food. We always find lots of worms in our class garden when we are gardening, so we have created a wormery to watch them at work.

In our Literacy Development, we have have made labels for the different stages of the life cycle and then created a writing map of the life cycle, to which we added our Makaton actions to help support our writing. After practising saying our sentences using our writing map, we wrote up the lifecycle using our phonic knowledge, ensuring all our sentences began with a capital letter and ended with a full stop. Fanastic writing recption class, you are really building up your writing stamina.

In our Mathematical Development, we have explored numerical patterns and doubling. So first, we looked at the concept of doubling and identified how groups of objects were represented and then repeated. Then we learnt to recognise doubles using dominoes and then ten frames and counters to identify the first part of the double and then added the second part. We have practiced saying our doubles in stem sentences for example: 3 and 3 makes 6, doubles 3 makes 6. To consolidate our learning we showed the different ways to make doubles in our journal. As we said in our song at the beginning of the week: double no trouble!

In our Creative Arts and Design Development, we have explored the symmetry in butterflies, linked to our theme 'mini beasts' and our story 'Caterpillar butterfly' by Vivian French. In the story the characters determine the name of the butterflies by their distinct markings. After looking at different types of butterflies and their colourings, we tried to create our own butterflies, which we folded in half to create a symmetrical effect.

In our music session with Mrs Swan, we started our adventures with Barney Bear. We learnt an element of performance, which is to do a certain action on a certain word of a song. We also began to learn our nursery rhyme rap.... you showed great 'rap attitude' for the chorus!

Our concept for RE this term is discipleship and trust. We quickly recapped from our recent story telling, that Jesus had 12 friends and they were called his disciples. We discussed that they copied Jesus and followed him wherever he asked them to go. We discussed that they put their trust in Jesus. This led us to play a few trust games and follow the leader on our adventure trail.

In our Physical Development, we started with a dish and dome game. I was very impressed with the team spirit the children showed. We then got out tennis rackets and balls to learn how to control two pieces of equipment at the same time. We learnt to strike the ball and follow it. We all worked very safely in the space!

In our Personal, Social and Emotional Development we started our new Heartsmart topic, No way through isn't true, by thinking about the things that help us to grow. As a class we decided love, food, water and sleep all help us to grow. We then heard that Boris says 'making mistakes helps us to grow', and this gave us lots of opportunities to talk about making mistakes. We recapped on the story of Boris and how he tried to make a birthday cake for his friend Amber, but sadly the cake burnt and the kitchen got soaked . We understood that Boris made some mistakes, but that's okay, we all make mistakes. Making mistakes is how we learn and grow. We also enjoyed watching a familiar song from Mollie and Mac and this helped us to think about when we make mistakes and what we can do to help put them right. We drew these experiences to share with the class.

Boris says, 'Making mistakes helps us to grow'.

If they fall, they will not stay down, because the Lord will help them up. psalm 37:24

For our wellbeing this week, we listen to some relaxing music whilst trying to draw symmetrical sqiggles on a piece of paper using a pencil in each hand, at the same time! This was easier said than done and we really had to concentrate.

In independent learning time we have followed our interests and made kites to fly in the breeze.

Have a lovely weekend
Mrs Ward and the Early Years Team.