Reception class weekly news

Dear T-Rex we are loving learning all about dinosaurs...

After exploring our chosen text 'Dear Dinosaur' a little more this week we started to look at the main features of letter writing. We discovered that Max and T- Rex shared information about themselves and asked questions of each other. To help us compose our own letters to T-Rex we thought about what we would tell the dinosaur about ourselves and what we would like to find out more about: for example, does he like sausages and ice cream or what's his favourite bath toy? We created picture prompts to help us remember the order of our letter and then set about making a draft copy. When we were happy with our efforts we copied it onto our posh paper so we could post off the museum. I hope we don't have to wait too long for a reply!

In our mathematics learning this week we have been counting up to 8 objects and showing them using concrete representations as well as showing different ways to make 8 on the 10 frame. Building upon our knowledge of number bonds we used different coloured counters to show that 5 and 3 make 8, 4 and 4 make 8, 2 and 6 make 8 and 7 and 1 make 8 as well as the reverse of each of these. Once confident we showed 8, in lots of ways in the abstract form, in our journals.

This week we have also been sharing lots of information books that we have gotten from the library. We knew from last weeks learning that dinosaurs are extinct and our understanding of them comes from fossils but we were curious to find out how a dinosaur became a fossil. We discovered that when a dinosaur died near a river or lake, sand or mud covered its body. After time just its bones and teeth would be left and then millions of years later the mud and sand turned into rock and the dinosaur bones and teeth turned to stone too and became fossils. We were fascinated by this and created our own fossils using clay and imprinted the shape of a dinosaur into it. Hopefully over the weekend on a warm radiator, the clay will harden and look like stone.

We do enjoy a good fact in reception and this week's facts are: the smallest dinosaur that has been discovered was the size of a crow. We have been studying the birds to see if we can see how small that would have been and that the largest dinosaur egg ever found was the size of a football!

In PE, with Mrs Swan, we have been exploring different ways of jumping whilst attempting to bend our knees when we land. It's trickier than you think! We have also tried to make our bodies travel further from the apparatus as we jump by using our arms and swinging them upwards. Music was very exciting this week too as we all had a set of glockenspiels and learnt how to play different notes.

There has been a lot of time travel in the garden this week as we have travelled back millions of years to the land of the dinosaurs to go on a dinosaur hunt! On our arrival we heard roaring sounds but we couldn't make out where they were coming from. With our trembling legs we set off, only armed with a magnifying glass and soon discovered footprints in the long grass. When we measured them they were exactly a ruler long! We knew it had to be a T-Rex. Onward we went through the jungle, over the river until finally we found a large T-Rex! It sounded very hungry, so quickly back over the river, back through the jungle until we were safe in our time machine and back to school. After all that excitement we made a picture story of our adventure and labelled it to share with our friends.

Our very busy week finished with Australia day. A huge thank you to all our grown ups who were busy baking cakes for the cake stall today and for the extremely generous donations that will go towards supporting Clifton Creek Primary School, in Victoria.

Enjoy your weekend and I'll see you all on Monday
Mrs Taylor
and the reception team