Reception class weekly news

God said, 'See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed bearing fruit, they shall be yours for food.'
Genesis 1.29

This week we have continued our exploration of the Christian celebration of Harvest as part of our Understanding the World area of development. Wrapping up warm in coats and wellingtons, we embarked on an autumn walk around the school and gathered the last of the apples from the trees in the mini orchard.

We are so fortunate to have many different trees on the school grounds, so we took the opportunity to see if we could identify some of them from their fallen leaves and tree bark. We found a magnificent silver birch with its distinctive bark on its trunk and gave it a lovely hug as well as a few oak trees. We found lots of acorns amongst the fallen leaves and understood that these were also fruit from the oak tree, but not ones we could eat. We recognised that birds and squirrels had been nibbling on a few and that they would be collecting them and storing them for their winter food.

To help develop our Communication and Language skills this week, we have took turns to share our favourite story books from home, showing an awareness for the listener, as we discussed characters, story endings and favourite illustrations. We also sang our favourite nursery rhymes.

In our Literacy-based activities this week, we continued the rhyming theme and wrote rhyming captions for picture for example: dog on a log and cat on a mat. After making our harvest cards for our families, we wrote them a message inside, showing off our neat letter formation. We hope you like them?

This week in our daily phonics sessions, we have added e, l, h, special friend sound 'sh' and ending sound 'ck' to our known sounds. We have practiced saying the sounds in different words, reading sounds, writing sounds, and blending sounds to say the words that Fred (our phonics frog) has sounded out to us. Adding to our phonics sessions we have now introduced word time where we are beginning to distinguish how many sounds we can hear in a spoken word, using our 'Fred fingers' to identify each sound and then use this knowledge to make words in our writing and reading activities across the week.

In PE as part of our Physical Development we negotiated space, looking at how we could avoid bumping into each other like Mr Bump! We then showed how we can control a ball around our space.

In our Mathematical Development we explored the concept of sorting objects into two groups based on size, colour, or shape. This led us to discover that groups can be sorted in different ways and into more than two groups by looking at similarities and differences in objects. In identifying objects that are different we could confidently use the term 'odd one out.'

This week in our PHSE Heartsmart lesson with Boris, as part of our Personal, Social and Emotional development we explored how to read peoples emotions by their facial expressions and body language.

With our apple tree windfall in our Creative Arts and Design development, we made apple crumbles on Friday as a harvest gift for our families. We hope you enjoyed eating them as much as we enjoyed making them for you.

Have a lovely weekend
Mrs Taylor, Alex and Rachael.