Reception Class News 12: 11: 21

Reception Class Remembers.

Thank you Reception Class for another fantastic week of learning.

In our Understanding the World Development, we have explored what is Remembrance Day and why we wear poppies. After watching a short video of when poppies were made 100 years ago, we understood that they were made to be worn by people to remember the people who were injured or died fighting during World War I and then ever since. We understand that these events have taken place in the past and when we are discussing people and events from the past, it is called history. We created our own poppy cross in the classroom to help us remember the injured and fallen soldiers from the past and present day. At 11'o clock, we joined the rest of the school in observing a 2 minute silence. Well done Reception class, you stood so still and quiet, I was really proud of you.

It our Literacy Development, we have focused on joining in with story dialogue, using our story map for 'The little red hen' as part of our talk 4 writing. We reminded ourselves that 'The little red hen 'is a traditional tale and has been told by parents and grandparents for many generations. As we looked through the pictures we recalled that many traditional tales were set in the country and involved animals as characters.
After rereading the story we created a story map together to help us with our story dialogue and repeated phrases.

In our Language and Communication Development, we have really enjoyed sharing the book 'The last Garden' by Rachel Ip and Anneli Bray, exploring new vocabulary as the main character Zara, tends to her garden in a war-torn land. Using the pictures, we were able to discuss the impact of the war on the environment within the city and how peace, hope and a few green fingers restored Zara's garden for all her school friends to enjoy again.

In our Expressive Arts and Design development, we have explored the colour variations in poppies and attempted to blend a limited palette of colours to paint some poppies for our remembrance display. In our music, we have continued to learn the different songs for our Nativity, adding actions to help us remember the words and sequence some of events sung about in the songs.

Boris our Heartsmart Robot has been helping us this week to explore the similarities and differences between us and our friends as part of our Personal, Social and Emotional Development. Using mirrors, we worked in pairs to play mirror mirror, discussing our features and comparing with our friends, before drawing a self-portrait.
Boris says 'We all have similarities and differences. I love being me' which we linked to Mark 12:31 love their neighbour as you love yourself. It is important to remember to treat everyone with respect, just as we want them to treat us.

In our wellbeing time we spent time with our year 6 buddies, sharing books and listening to some of our favourite reading challenge stories.

In our physical Development, we have had a very busy week getting active. In our Monday PE session, we learnt to be creative in our use of travelling movements. To warm up first we moved around at different levels, high, medium and low to 'bare necessities' from Jungle Book. Our low level moves included sliding, slithering and soldier crawls. Our medium level moves included hand and feet crawl keeping contact with the floor. Our high level moves included stretched positions on tip toe or hopping, leaping or skipping. Once warmed up we used our actions in our motif to help us develop a travelling section, moving in time to the music, incorporating changes in level. Once confident we took turns to perform our performance to our peers. This gave us the opportunity to review each other's performances, saying what we thought they performed really well and what they could improve on. This was certainly an energetic session and we took time to cool down our bodies with some slow stretches.

We were also very excited this week to have an extra PE session led by Mrs Eaves, as we like to call him, our PE expert! We began our session by warming up our bodies by jumping on the spot, turning whilst jumping, running on the spot and some very impressive one handed press ups! Then we listened to the story "One night at the zoo" by Judith Kerr and discussed the different animal movements we could make to imitate the animals in the story: stomping our feet for the elephant, jumping for the kangaroo, pulling our bodies along the floor for a crocodile, tip toeing for the prowling lion, crawling backwards and forwards for the bear, balancing on one leg for a flamingo, walking tall for the giraffe, running fast for the tiger and finding a partner to link up to for the monkey. Once our moves were established, we walked around the zoo with our binoculars and then when the different animals were spotted we travelled around the hall in the agreed movements.
Our favourite bit of the lesson by far, was climbing on the high frames and using all the climbing equipment set out. We definitely had rosy cheeks after this session.

With Hayley, we have practiced the skills of dribbling the ball, passing to a freind and then kicking the ball at the goal in a game of football.

In our Mathematical Development, we have explored change within 5 and learnt how to use first, then and now story structures to explore adding one more to given numbers, using lots of practical opportunities with our resources and representing this pictorially in our maths journals. We understand that the next number we count is one more than the previous number. We look forward to explore the reverse action to this next week as we encounter one less.

We have followed our own interests over the week in continuous provision with making rockets, identifying birds in the garden, observing the change in the weather each day and making a weather chart, making shape biscuits with dough and challenging Mrs Ward to the yes / no game. I must try harder, I didn't win a single game!

Have a super weekend Reception Class
Mrs Ward