Reception Class News 03:02:23

Reception class, what a fantastic end to our week. You all looked amazing in your number outfits to support NSPCC number day. A huge thank you to our families for the creative flair used in making them for us.

Let's share our learning this week...
Understanding the World Development
This week has also been International Interfaith Harmony Week, where we have explored the concept of helping others through the Native American story 'Rainbow crow' who helped all the animals in danger by travelling to the heavens to ask for help from the creator. We then swapped the animals in the story for people of different cultures and religious groups. We decided that the creator was God and thought about the shared values of 'The Golden Rule' and how we can serve others. We created our own rainbow crow using our handprint, added feathers and a message of how we could serve others. We shared our work with the rest of school in a special interfaith worship.

In our forest school session we learnt about moles. We have lots of evidence that moles like in our local environment, so we watched carefully by the fresh mole hills to see if there was there was any movement. We have learnt that moles eat every 3 to 4 hours and are carnivores who eat worms. We mimicked the sound of rain to see if this would entice them to peep out of the soil, but no luck!
We then moved to our activity session that followed on from last week, making our chosen minibeast from clay, using sticks for legs and feelers and some google eyes.

Our favourite learning word this week has to be the collective noun for Ladybugs / Ladybirds: a 'loveliness.' How lovely!

Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Wellbeing
This week in our Heart Smart we are learning how we can show love to others when they need help and how we can respond to the needs of others. We thought about who helps us and what they do to help us. We talked about how we are helped by someone who loves us. As a circle time, we shared who we help some of our ideas were; "I help Daddy wash the dishes" "I help my baby sister when she is upset" "I help my teacher at tidy up time"

We talked about how sometimes we might be asked for our help but we can also be looking out for opportunities to offer help. To finish our session we each had a heart shaped piece of paper which we used to draw a picture of us helping someone we love.
Boris says, 'We can show others we love them by helping them when they need help.' Bible link 'Do not be interested only in your own life, but be interested in the lives of others' Philippians 2:4

In My Happy Mind, we took turns to pick a heart from our thankfulness lucky dip jar and thought about something we are thankful for in the categories: person, place or activity.

Expressive Arts and Design
In music this week we continued our 'Everyone' topic. We started the session by listening to 'Conga' by Miami Sound Machine. After listening, we learnt what the song was called and that Gloria Estefan was singing it, she is the lead singer of Miami Sound Machine. We discovered that they sing Latin American music, which is music that originated from Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries of the Americas and the Caribbean.

We found out that there are lots of famous dances that can be done to this music; Salsa, Merengue and Tango are a few. We talked about how this piece of music made us feel, nearly all of us said that it made us want to dance! In fact we even got up and went around our classroom in a conga line, it was great fun! Next, for the first time this year we used the instruments, we each got a glockenspiel, we learnt that a glockenspiel is from Germany and means 'set of bells' in German. We also discovered the difference between a xylophone and a glockenspiel is that a xylophone has wooden bars, whilst a glockenspiel has metal bars.

We learnt that the different bars represent different musical notes and each makes a different sound. We practiced playing our instruments at different volumes, Mrs. Wainwright was the conductor and we followed her instructions playing louder when she raised her hand and quieter when her hand lowered. Finally we sang 'If you're happy and you know it' putting in the line 'If you're happy and you know it play your glock' we then played the D note and G note.
We can't wait to use the instruments again!

Mathematical Development
This week we have consolidated last week's learning of comparing groups up to 10 by checking if there were more than one possible answer for some questions, strengthening and deepening our understanding of this concept. Using cubes to represent groups of objects we could identify which group had more or fewer as well as how many more or fewer each group had.

In our NSPCC number activities today we played higher and lower on the interactive board with numbers to 10. We also watched the number café and made number bonds to 10 using numicon.

In our table activities we made mathematical stars, dotty symmetrical butterflies with number on dots and created a Fibonacci number character. Thank you Mrs. Burns for organising such a fun Friday, we loved it!

Literacy Development
In our daily Read Write Ink sessions, we have continued to increase our letter sound knowledge and apply this in our reading and writing activities. We have also continued with daily handwriting activities this week as we have focused on forming the down around letters c, a, o d and g more accurately.
We have continued our Hansel and Gretel story this week and focused on identifying story settings and our understanding that the story has a beginning, a middle and an ending. We explored the story beginning and noticed that it begins the same way as the other traditional tales we have read so far with 'Once upon a time.' Using pictures we sequenced the story beginning and used them as a stimuli for retelling the story so far.

Communication and Language Development
It has been quite windy outside this week and we have enjoyed listening to our poem of the week 'Wind' by Shirley Hughes and exploring words: gusty, blustery and fierce!

Physical Development
After our warm up , jumping around pretending to be different animal we worked with a partner to roll in canon (one after the other) with one following the other's lead. We varied our rolls with the five we know so far: egg, pencil, log, forward and shoulder. We have definitely improved our technique as we demonstrated good starting and finishing positions. In our apparatus work we worked with a partner to perform a sequence in canon to include different types of rolling and rocking, different balance positions and a jump. I think we have a few budding gymnasts in class as we are really starting to show great control and skill in some of the positions.

Have a lovely weekend Reception Class
Mrs Ward and the Reception team, Mrs Wainwright and Louise