Reception Class News 17:09:21

Another fantastic week Reception Class!
I am so proud of how you are all settled and very happy in school.
I love how we have become a little class who love to learn, play and discover together.

Let's share our learning...

In our literacy development, we built upon last week' learning, using our story map and story actions for 'Mr Gumpy's Outing' by John Burningham to start to independently sequence the story and retell in our own words. This week we have become more confident in our retelling and are able to use most of the story language from the book. We are also beginning to use our voices effectively for the different characters and key events in the story.

In our communication and language development, we have enjoyed listening to some of our new favourite stories from our reading challenge basket and talking about why we like them. We have discovered that we like stories that have good or happy endings, like the 'Three Little Pigs' and 'The Teddy Robber' and we also like stories where it has big letters to show us when we need a louder voice to say a word. I think our most read book this week is 'Six Dinner Sid.' We love that he is a clever cat to get six dinners, in six different houses!

In our mathematical development, we have enjoyed finding out the different character who help us with our Power Maths: Astrid, Ash, Flo, Dexter and Sparks the cat. Our focus this week was to count forwards and backward, linking our skills of counting concrete objects to pictorial representations and then to abstract numbers. We began by learning a number song, which we sang along to and joined in with the different actions, matching each action to a spoken number.
We then looked at counting backwards, or down the number line, to play a game of 3, 2, 1 go, where we had to a different number of actions. Using a picture as a stimulus we counted the different amounts of objects, seeing if we could subitise or count out carefully. Flo and Dexter gave us some great tips for counting which we practiced: putting our objects in a line and touching each object as we counted. This was useful as it stopped us from counting some objects twice.
As we became more confident, we stated to match numbers to groups of objects. Our reflection activity at the end of our week was to independently show our understanding of number by representing the given number in drawing form.

As part of our personal, social and emotional development, we had our first Heartsmart session, where we met Dave and Boris. Dave explained that Boris is a very special robot as he is the only robot with a heart. Boris wanted us to think about the different ways we can be Heartsmart. Boris uses some great tools in his shed to remind him and he kindly let us look at them.
His hammer reminds us that we are special.
His screw driver reminds us to love others.
His saw reminds us that we can do things.
His spanner reminds us to be a good friend.
And finally his pliers remind us to tell the truth.

To help us become Heartsmart like Boris we made a tool belt to take home. This lesson linked to the bible quote from:
Proverbs. 4::23 Be careful how you think, your life is shaped by your thoughts.

This week we have included a wellbeing activity into our day. We have talked about why it is important for us to have a healthy mind as well as a healthy body. We chose to go for walks around the field and enjoy the wonder of nature around us. We have a wondeful collection of different coloured leaves that we found and sycamore seed pods. Most impressively we were able to identify some of the different trees on our field. We have some lovely mountain ash trees that are in the forest school area, full of bright red berries. We thing the birds will have a wonderful feast on them.

In our physical development, we focused on balancing on one leg, whilst still and then maintaining our balance while moving slowly with Mrs Swan. We used our arms to help us balance, we also used our eyes HÙY\™ÈÝ\ˆXYÈ\ˆÚ[^KÝ\ˆÜܝØ\HÛØXÚÙHX\›ÚHÙHØ\›H\™ÛÛÛÝۈÝ\ˆ›ÙY\È\È\و^\˜Ú\ÙH™ˆ˜XÝXÙYY™™\™Þ