Reception Class news

'It was on a starry night
When the hills were bright...'

This week has been an incredibly busy one in the reception classroom, as we have been filming our 'Nativity story' alongside our learning.

As part of our Communication and Language development we have been learning Makaton actions to accompany our singing of 'It was on a starry night' to share with families, which has been great fun.

In our Heartsmart time, as part of our Personal, Social and Emotional Development we ventured out to the forest school area to learn more about our talents and how important it is to know that we all have different talents and skills. We chose a talent that we would like to share and gathered around to take part in our own talent show. It was a privilege to see all the talents. Boris our Heartsmart Robot says, 'We all have different talents and skills.'

Whatever you do, do it all for God's glory. 1 Corinthians 10:31

We have continued with our Advent Actions this week and each day have focused on being kind and loving to one another, playing nicely, using our classroom manners, which can easily be forgotten when we are tired and trying our best in our learning jobs.

For our Wellbeing and Spiritual Development we focused on stilling our bodies and in the quietness, we began to become conscious of our breathing, taking deep breaths in through our noses and slowly exhaling through our mouths. In this moment of quiet, we tuned into the natural sounds around us, becoming aware of nature and the sounds of the birds.

In PE with Mrs Swan, as part of our Physical Development, we did Christmas Yoga! Learning new poses and improving on some we already knew.

Our classroom has resembled Father Christmas's workshop this week, as we have been busy little Elves making our Christmas cards and calendars in preparation to take home next week. This has challenged us to use a range of skills as part of our Creative Arts and Design Development. Whilst we don't want to spoil the surprise for our families, we can let you know we have printed using shapes, manipulated cold and hard clay into warm and pliable decorations to hang on our trees at home, finger painted leaves representing the seasons on trees and water coloured the backgrounds.

Once our cards were complete, we wrote out our Christmas messages to our families as part of our Literacy Development.

In our Mathematical Development we have continued to recognise numbers and form them correctly. We are nearly there, 2's, 3's and 5's can be tricky!

In RE as part of our Understanding the World Development we have looked at pictures showing the significant parts of the nativity story and talked about how the characters might be thinking about Jesus then. We then created our own Nativity scene by placing each character in the story into the Stable and then thought about who was the most important person in the story.
We showed that Jesus was the most important person by placing him in the centre of the scene and discussed why Christians have Nativity sets in their homes and churches.

In our unplugged coding activity we made our own grid out of tiles on the floor and placed a star in one of the tiles, we then gave out instructions to our 'King' to move so he could follow the star.

Have a lovely weekend
See you on Monday for our last week of learning and fun.
Mrs Taylor and the Early Years Team.