Reception weekly news

Wow Reception class, I cannot believe we have completed our second week together. It has gone incredibly fast !

In our communication and language development this week, we have continued to settle into the rhythms and routines of school life, ensuring we have listened to adults and followed instructions carefully. We have mastered the non verbal signals that are part of our daily phonics sessions: my turn, your turn, talk to your partner, magnet eyes and listening ears. Some of us have shared this with our parents at home, and I hear that the phonics teaching is going well!

We have continued to enjoy listening to our story 'The pencil' and discussed different elements of the story, the story setting and new vocabulary encountered. As part of our journey of self discovery, we have introduced ourselves to the group, sharing information about who or what is special to us.

During our snack time, we have used the opportunity of quiet time together to develop our conversational skills, using a story or event as a stimulus. We are getting better at listening to each other and then asking questions to find out additional information. We especially enjoyed discussing ways in which we like to relax at home. Apparently trampolining is a very popular relaxing activity!

In our physical development we have continued to practice holding our pencils in an effective dynamic tripod grip when forming letter sounds, writing our names and colouring in provision.
This week we had our first PE lesson with Mrs Swan, which was very exciting. We successfully changed into our PE kits, without losing any of our belongings. We learnt how to find a space then travel around the playground negotiating space successfully, adjusting our speed and then coming to a stop. We also got to play the bean game!

For our personal, social and emotional development, we have continued to get to know each other during circle time. We have enjoyed our first mindful session where we focus on our breathing, closed our eyes and focused on an image in our minds that made us feel happy.
Interestingly being in the garden makes lots of us feel happy!
We also met Boris this week as part of our Heartsmart PHSE curriculum. Boris is the only robot with a heart. He introduced us to his toolkit where he keeps a special set of tool to help him be Heartsmart and we made our own tool to hep remind us that we are special, we love others, we are good friends, we tell the truth and that if we try we can do things. Next week is very exciting as we will make our own life size Boris robot.

In our literacy we have begun our Read Write Inc phonic sessions and the sounds that we have learnt this week are m,a,s,d and t . 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) sounded out to us.

In our writing we have continued to practice writing our name in different contexts, making cards and pictures for friends or family and signing our name, some of us have also managed to include messages. It is so lovely to see such independent writing.

For our mathematical development we have started to count to three and back from 3 in songs and rhymes. We have counted actions and objects building on the concept that numbers can go forward and backwards. using buckets and spades we recreated an image in our sand tray and practiced one to one correspondence to link what we were saying with a physical representation of the number. We explored what 'how many' means and how you find the answer. We discovered that it didn't matter how we arranged our buckets and spades, we still had the same number (cardinality). It was also a good opportunity to make a few sandcastles while the sun shone in the garden! And finally we counted to three using abstraction by showing different ways to make three in our maths journal. Very impressive maths work this week reception!

Delving back into our book 'The pencil' we thought about what the pencil drew once he had drawn a boy and his pets, he drew a home for them to live in and so for our expressive arts and design development we thought about our homes. We thought about the different shapes that we could recognise in them to help us draw them and then particular colours we needed to select to colour them in. It was a lovely opportunity to talk about our homes, detailing our bedroom décor, plants and tree that grow outside, even a few daddies on the driveways made it into our pictures!

It has been such a busy week, thank goodness the weekend has arrived for us all to have a rest.

Have a lovely weekend
Mrs Taylor, Alex and Rachel.