Reception News 07:05:21

Reception class, whilst this week has been shorter than normal, you have packed it full of fantastic learning, exploring the world around you through our theme growing and generally putting a huge smile on my face with all that you do.

Let's share with everybody what we have been up to...

In our Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Wellbeing we have been learning about why it is important to be honest and always tell the truth with Boris in our Heartsmart session. Boris shared with us the Mi'kmaq Native American tale of how Rabbit got long ears by playing a trick on his friends and telling them a deliberate lie, that the sun would never rise again. Rabbit's lie made his friends scared, worried and start to behave differently as they faced uncertainty about their future as they began to prepare their homes and food stores for what they thought was a new life of darkness.

Through our discussion about rabbit and the consequences of his lie, we understood how important it is to always tell the truth and show sensitivity to others feelings, so that we can have good friendships.

Our bible link was John 8:32 'The truth will free you'

In continuous provision we have followed our personal, social and emotional interests by forming friendship circles and organising play and helping and supporting each other.

With Mrs Swan in our Physical Development, we looked at how to stand when throwing or catching a ball, developing our hand-eye coordination as well as agility. Once confident, we then progressed to bouncing the ball to our partner with control and ensuring our feet were were in a good position to steady ourselves

In continuous provision we have have followed our physical development interests by using the play equipment in the garden, throwing and catching balls, kicking and passing balls, jumping the tyre trail, digging and weeding the veg beds, constructing farms and houses with large scale blocks and planks.

For our Literacy Development, we identified the different parts of a dissected plant and wrote labels for our drawing, focusing on letter formation and identifying sounds and special friend sounds in words.

As a class of keen readers, we are happy to share our great news, that many of us have achieved our bronze reading awards as part of our reading challenge. Keep up the great wok and it won't be long before we are handing out the silver awards!

In continuous provision we have pursued our literacy interests by making and writing small books containing short stories to share with the class, enjoying the reading challenge books in our reading tree house, writing greeting cards to friends, shopping lists in the kitchen, recipe books to make tomato sauce and rainbow cakes and party lists.

Building upon last week's learning of AB patterns, we explored more complex patterns in our Mathematical Development. First, we looked at patterns that occur in the real world, like paving, fencing and brickwork and discussed the similarities and differences. As we explored more examples of patterns and identified the core and the repeats, we could say the pattern out loud and identify whether it was an ABC, AAB or ABB pattern as well create our own complex patterns using objects.

We loved dressing up with numbers on Thursday to celebrate 'NSPCC Number Day' and had great fun playing number games: higher or lower, think of a number, snakes and ladders, what's the time and singing number songs.

In continuous provision we have pursued our mathematical interests by exploring capacity as we collected and measured rain water and made ABB and AAB patterns using natural objects.

We have really enjoyed watching our plants grow from seeds, so for our Creative Arts and Design Development, we carefully took one of our tomato plants out of its pot and exposed the root system and stem to see how they had grown from the seed. We then made observational drawings of the roots, stem, side shoots, leaves and small delicate yellow flowers at the top.

Continuing with our work on funky music, we appraised some very funky music and learned to sing the 'Big Bear Funk' song. Using dance moves and a finishing pose, we sang along to the well known song 'head, shoulders, knees and toes.'

In continuous provision we have followed our creative interests by making collages of different birds cut from cards and newspapers clippings, pictures of birds using craft materials and feathers, greeting cards with images of flowers, designed gowns for princesses and even made sun hats from tissue boxes!

We have been very fortunate to have received some tree whips from The Woodland Trust so we can take part in a native tree planting event over the next few weeks as part of our Understanding the World Development. After listening to a story about how trees help to improve our environment, we related it to 'The Lorax' play we watched on World Day and reminded ourselves that looking after trees and planet earth are all of our responsibilities. Evie, our science expert shared her knowledge that trees take carbon dioxide from the air and give us oxygen back, so trees are very important to keeping us healthy. And as we are very quickly becoming a class of 'twitchers' with a keen interest in local bird life in our garden, trees are great places for birds to make nests!

Speaking of twitching, in continuous provision we have followed our interests and continued to count and tick off the birds we spot in our garden against our big bird chart. So far, we have spotted, doves, pigeons, robins, hedge sparrows and whilst my back was turned, apparently a sparrow hawk!

In RE, we have continued our learning about what Christians believe about The Holy Spirit and why God sent it as a gift to Jesus' disciples after he ascended to heaven. We related the experience of the disciples to our experience of harnessing the power of the wind in our garden windmills on a windy day, and whilst we cant see the wind, we can see the effects of it on other objects. Looking at different artist's impressions of the Holy spirit we created an image using greens and blues to show the movement of the 'Holy Spirit' like wind.

Thank you for such a lovely week and being such fantastic learners.
Have a lovely weekend
Mrs Ward