Reception Weekly News

'Once upon a bicycle so they say...'
We are very excited in reception class to begin a new term and are loving our book to lead the learning 'The jolly postman and other peoples letters' by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.

In our Communication and Language and Literacy Development we have enjoyed listening to our new story book to lead learning and thought about some of the letters that it contained. One of the letters was from Goldilocks to the Three Bears to say sorry. As a class we decided we would write back to and composed our ideas for a reply. To aid our memory and develop our talk for writing we used Makaton actions to support our speech and rehearsed this to be confident writers. Well done reception, you were brilliant at this!

In our mathematical development this week we have explored change within 5 by adding one more using first, then and now story structures to explain the process. We began by exploring what 'more' means and then in practical activities added one more child to a group and used the story structures to explain it to the group. We then transferred this process from concrete to pictorial and used cubes on a five frame to represent our number stories. To reflect our learning we applied our one more stories into our journals by drawing them into our five frame scaffolds.

This week in our People and Communities strand of Understanding the World Development, we discussed why people are wearing poppies this week and who they remembering when they wear them. In our pause for thought worship we listened to George who remembered hiding in a field of cabbages during an air raid and that each time he has cabbage with his dinner, he is reminded of how lucky he was to be alive. This helped us to think about good memories as part of our reflection and why remembering past events is important to people. Linking to our Arts and Design development we made observational drawings of poppies and sensitively painted them with watercolours. We think you will agree, they look beautiful.

Our unplugged coding activity this week was to guide the mouse around the path of cards to find the pieces of hidden cheese. We had to use instructional words: move, forward, turn and backwards. We are getting super confident with this as the mouse manged to eat all his cheese. I think he was getting rather full by the end of the activity as he kept falling over!

In addition to our beautiful poppy art work as part of our Arts and Design Development, we have shown control and independence in our music session, playing instruments within a song. We also looked at action songs to help aid memory of the words.

In PE this week this week with Mrs Swan, as part of our Physical Development, we looked at actions that go with well known songs, to perform a small dance. We have also continued each day to run, jog or walk our daily mile track to increase our levels of fitness.

'Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens' were a few of Maria's favourite things that she sang about to help herself feel better when she is feeling sad. As we listened to the clip from The Sound of Music as part of our Heartsmart lesson, as part of our Personal, Social and emotional Development, we considered the things that make us happy and created a huge class heart with them illustrated inside so that we can use it in class if anyone of us is sd we can remind ourselves what makes us happy or remind a friend if they need cheering up.

For our Mindful Monday activity we sat comfortably on the carpet and relaxed our breathing as we closed our eyes. Imagining a huge red balloon drifted nearing us with a dangling ribbon, we imagined holding onto the ribbon and gently floating off as the balloon carried us to a happy place. Picturing what it looked like in our mind's eye and thought about any smells or noises we could associate with our happy place and why this place made us happy. Slowly and gently the balloon lowered back to our resting sitting place and we opened our eyes. Sharing our happy places as a group reminded us how we can help ourselves to feel calm and happy at times.

Have a calm and happy weekend
Mrs Taylor and the Reception Class Team.