Reception weekly news

We travelled back in time. Back to the time of the dinosaurs !

What an adventure we have been on this week. Recounting our dinosaur adventure from last week in the garden from our picture stories and structuring into sentences with actions to help us when we came to writing it up. This was our first attempt at story writing and we were very pleased with our completed stories. We challenged ourselves to add extra details and describing words to make it exciting for the reader and we remembered to start each sentence with a capital letter and finish with a full stop, we even underlined all our special friend sounds in words!

Story telling is a firm favourite this week too with 'The adventures of the big orange wellies.' Once we put the wellies on, off on an adventure around the garden we would go! The wellies took us anywhere we wanted, through thick oozy mud, splishy, sploshy streams and rivers, even dark tunnels and caves! When we took the wellies off we printed our pictures and put them in the story book, where a grown up wrote our words exactly as we said them! Finally they are read as a story to the class each day.

In our mathematics, our learning focus this week has been the number 9 and 10, using the ten frame to scaffold our learning of the cardinality of the numbers and showing different representations up to 10. We used the story book 'Ten Little dinosaurs' to support us in our classroom provision. To challenge ourselves we have also been counting up to 20 and back down to 0, sometimes starting from any given number.

We have been keen archaeologists this week, using small excavation tools to chip away at pieces of stone, revealing fossils and dinosaur bones which we then pieced together to create dinosaur skeletons. It was certainly dusty work, but very exciting once the fossil and bones were exposed. They came with an exciting new app and resource called 'Legendary dinosaurs' which we explored as part of our technology provision. When we held the dinosaur card behind our iPads they became a 3D dinosaur on the screen which we then directed to move over different terrains. I think the bit that excited us the most was when we turned the camera on and we too, became part of the picture with the dinosaur. Great Fun!

In PE with Mrs Swan we have continued with our unit of work: Gymnastics. We are becoming more skilled at balancing on equipment and dismounting them safely . In music this week we have been singing a range of dinosaur songs as well as appraising different styles of music.

For expressive arts and design we have watched a step by step guide for drawing dinosaurs which we have followed carefully, they look so good, visitors to our class think they have been drawn an adult! After watercolour painting them , we cut around then to create dinosaur puppets, fixing them onto small wooden sticks. Then we set about making a background for the puppets to be used against. Using pastel and wax crayons we drew long grasses and ferns and then inked with green Brusho. Once dry we made long slits for the stick to go through so the dinosaur moves along the plants. They look fantastic!

Have a great weekend
Mrs Taylor and the reception team