Reception Class weekly news

Off went the postman, toodle -oo!
To the gingerbread cottage and garage too!
With a letter for the wicked witch.

This week we have continued to enjoy and explore our story 'The jolly postman and other peoples letters' and imagined the village where the postman delivers to all the traditional tales characters. As part of Understanding the World: people and communities, we looked at a big map and discussed why people use maps and what they tell us. We compared the world map to our local village map that has images of points of interest; the post office, the church tower and the pub! We recalled the different houses that the postman visited and then drew our own map of the jolly postman's village.

In our mathematical development, we have been finding one less than a given number using practical objects and pictures to help us. We used the first, then and now story structures to explore and explain to our talking partner 'one less'. To help us with our understanding of this concept we sang and acted out 'five green bottles' and '5 in the bed' and talked about there being 'one less' each time a person or bottle fell out. In our journals we worked independently to represent one less using pictures and then crossed one out, rather than rubbed out, so we could see the number we started with and to see what we had left.

In our Literacy development, we looked at the letter sent to the wicked witch in our story and discovered that it was a poster advertising everything a modern day witch may wish to buy.
We thought about some of the things we would try to sell her and made our own posters and labelled them to make it easy for the witch to read. I hope she liked our examples from our enchanted range!

My heart and learning to talk about how we demonstrate different emotions was the focus for our Heartsmart lesson this week as part of our Personal, Social and Emotional development.
Boris our Heartsmart robot is different from other robots as he has a heart. We all have hearts too, so we ran on the spot for one minute and then felt our heart beating. We learnt that the heart has a very important job to do, it pumps our blood round our bodies to keep us alive. We could feel this by taking our own pulse on our wrists. When our heart is happy our body feels happy! looking at different heart emojis we explored what our face would look like if our hearts were sad, excited or even angry! We talked about which emotion we most like to feel and it was definitely happy !
A happy heart is like good medicine: proverbs 17:22

In our mindfulness activity this week we thought about our how unique we all are and how we each have star qualities, something we are good at. We considered some of the character qualities our friends might have but they haven't recognised in themselves, such as being kind, caring or helpful. We filled our stars with drawings of our qualities to put in our class mindfulness book so we can look at it and remind ourselves in quiet thoughtful moments.

We continued to develop our dance routines in our PE session with Mrs Swan. We used the playground as a big square and did some corner work which was lots of fun, especially working our way to the centre one by one turning around and dancing to the opposite corner.

As part of our Remembrance commemoration we created some giant poppy artwork for our expressive art and design development, to create a poppy waterfall to our reflection table. In our music session we introduced our instruments within a song, using dynamics.

A huge thank you our virtual mystery readers this week, we have loved listening to your wonderful storytelling, it has been a real treat. Also thank you for the kind donations for Children in Need today, we enjoyed dressing up in our spots!

Have a lovely weekend
Mrs Taylor and the Reception team.