Reception weekly news

Welcome back everyone.

This week we were very excited to begin our new theme to help us with our learning: In the garden. We began by reading 'Camille and the Sunflowers' by Laurence Anholt and very soon discovered it was about a small boy called Camille and his friendship with an artist called Vincent Van Gogh. We loved his picture of the sunflowers shown at the end of the story and so created our own gallery of pictures, with observational drawings of sunflowers, which we coloured with watercolour paints. They certainly make our room feel warm and sunny!

We then considered what we would need to be able to plant sunflower seeds ready for the garden in spring and gathered the different resources: pots, soil, labels and seeds to help us. After discussing the order we would need to do this, we set about writing up a set of instructions for everyone to follow, in one of our literacy jobs.

Once our instructions were written, we were able to follow them to plant up our seeds.
We were all very excited when we could see a few shoots peeping out of the soil by the end of the week and we know that the scientific name for this process is germination. We look forward to seeing them grow over the coming weeks.

It's been a good week too, for putting on our wellingtons and getting out in the garden on a nature walk, looking for changes in our environment as Spring is approaching. We observed that there were new shoots on the raspberry canes, buds on the apple tree, blossom appearing on some of our shrubs, leaves appearing on the bean and pea shoots we planted last term, onions growing and some flower heads on the daffodils we planted in Autumn. It was so lovely to see signs of new life in the garden and see the physical changes to many of our plants.
Next week we will explore more why those physical changes take place.

In our mindfulness session this week we thought about our friendships in class. Using a gold star we passed it to a friend and told them how they had earned it. We had some lovely responses which made us feel loved and special. It's nice to hear when we have been a good friend or helpful when people find things tricky.

In our mathematics learning we have started to explore number bonds to ten using a variety of representations. Using the song ten green bottles we counted how many bottles were on the wall and how many were on the floor after each verse, then how many there were all together. We discovered there were always ten bottles but there were different ways to make ten. We then started to represent the different ways of making ten using a ten frame and double sided counters to represent the two different numbers. We then explained the number bond to our friend in a sentence. Once confident, we started to look at the missing numbers in number bonds, if we had 6 counters on our ten frame, we were able to work out how many more we needed to make up to ten. We are now confident to show the different ways to make ten through drawing number bonds.

This week in PE we have been critiquing our teddy bear rolls by recording each other on the
iPad and watching them back to see how we can improve our technique.
In music we have been attempting to play more notes in succession on the glockenspiels, in time to music.

PC Nick has also popped in this week to chat to us about staying safe on computers and tablets. He explained that if something pops up on our screen that we are not sure about or know shouldn't be there we should tell an adult straight away. The same again if someone asks us for information about us, such as our name or where we live. We will share this information with our families, thank you PC Nick.

In our independent learning time we have been very creative, using our imagination to make lots of moving pictures and puppets, especially garden scenes where butterflies move around the garden and flowers growing. We have also been retelling lots of different stories using memory boxes of past events in class. It's been great fun being members of the audience watching the performances and storytelling. No doubt our equity cards are in the post!

Have a great lovely weekend everyone
Mrs Taylor and Miss Alex