Reception weekly news

Reception class, it has been so lovely to welcome you back into school full time this week and for our classrooms to be filled with the wonderful sound of laughter and chatter again!
I am so impressed with how quickly you have settled back into the routine of learning and have adapted to the changes in our school environment to become our little class family once more.

Our theme for learning this week has been rainforests and in our literacy activities this week, you have listened to a range of different stories connected to the theme and discussed elements of the story, explaining which parts of the story were your favourite and why. You then talked about your favourite stories and illustrated a front cover of your favourite book.

After listening to The Tiger Who Came To Tea, you wrote a character description of the tiger which you then illustrated. Miss McCurrie kindly showed us some Makaton signing for this story retelling, which you enjoyed so much, you continued to use in your independent learning time.

After playing rainforest 'Who am I?' where you had described your creature to your friends and they asked questions to guess it, you then used the image to write about it's distinctive features using describing words. I was lovely to see you having a go at being independent writers again.

In our maths learning this week you have looked at the concept of measurement in relation to length, height, and distance. You used the words longer, shorter, and taller to compare lengths and recognised that to compare objects you needed to focus on lining them up from the same point. How long is a piece of string? this is a good question and one you investigated using different lengths of string and ribbon. Once you had established the order you then used Unifix cubes as a non standard measure to measure them. This you recorded in you journal accurately using the square markings to aid you. I was really impressed with your level of independence in carrying out the different parts of the activity to reach your conclusion.

In our afternoon project work, you have looked at the different animals that live in the rainforest and created your very own croaking frog using a paper cup, some ribbon, paper clips and an image of a frog. This proved quite a tricky project and not as easy as it looked on the instructions! You had to carefully make a slit using scissors on the base of the cup and then attach the paper clips securely to each end of the ribbon and thread through the slit so it could be pulled up and down to make the croaking sound. Once this tricky part was complete you decorated your rainforest frog, showing that some are brightly coloured for camouflage as well as a warning to other creatures: don't eat me I'm poisonous!

Who knew that chocolate comes from a cocoa bean, that grows on a cocoa tree, that can be found in rainforests in countries like Brazil. Well you do now! After listened to all the information about chocolate and it's link to the rainforests, you went on a virtual tour of a chocolate factory and answered the questions at the end to show your understanding and the best bit..... we got to try out different types of chocolate to see which was our favourite. mmmmm!

Our theme for worship this week has been kindness and you were joined in our classroom by a by a very special virtual guest , The Duchess of Cambridge, who spoke about the effect of kindness on our mental wellbeing and how we can show kindness in everyday activities.

You created a card to say thank you to someone who has been kind to you. You found out that being kind makes others feel happy but it is also very important to keep us happy as we look after our mental health. You discovered that the word mental health is just our emotions which are very important as we want to be happy and play with our friends. These cards were beautiful and I know that the people receiving them felt special because you thanked them.

Have a well earned, restful weekend and we will see you all back again on Monday
Mrs Taylor, Mr Dale and Miss Alex and the reception team.