Reception weekly news

Another busy week in reception...

What a fantastic way to start our week and Interfaith week reception, by exploring Aboriginal Australia, its culture and heritage. Using virtual reality, we were transported to the Far North Queensland rainforest and the Pamagirri Aboriginal group to witness their welcome, war and snake dance. We discovered that dancing is a highly valued skill within their culture and great pride is shown by those participating. We found it fascinating to learn about the aboriginal beliefs on creation and compare with the Christian belief. Aboriginal Australians refer to the Creation time as "Dreamtime". As declared by Jacob "This is the best day ever!"

As part of our study work on dinosaurs we chose Argentina as a country to explore, as it is where the largest dinosaur fossil was found that helped our understanding about giant dinosaurs. We found out facts such as the neck was ten meters long and we measured this out with string and a meter stick so we could show the exact length to others. We discovered that there are many languages that are spoken in Argentina: Spanish, Italian, English, German and French and so used our morning greeting to practice saying hello in each language.

In our quest for finding out more new facts, we discovered that one of the oldest groups of indigenous people to settle in Argentina was the Yamana people. They were hunter gatherers, similar to the Pamagirri tribe. We also discovered that the main religion of Argentina was Roman Catholic, with 92% of the population following this faith. We wrote up all our new found learning into a little booklet to show to the whole school in worship and to put in our study work books. They look pretty amazing reception and what a great job you all did standing up in worship and using your big voices to explain it to everyone!

This week we have also looked at healthy diets and food choices. We made some rather yummy fruit kebabs for snack and played a game of snack bingo!

In our mathematics learning we developed our confidence in using the part-whole model, identifying the whole and parts in different combinations, understanding that the combined parts make the whole number. Our new vocabulary this week was 'altogether', we used it to describe the two parts when we combined them.

Mrs Taylor