Reception Class News 03:03:23

Welcome back Reception Class. It has been lovely to hear your exciting adventures from the half term break.

We are very excited as a class to begin our new topic for learning: dinosaurs!!
My goodness, we have some fantastic dinosaur experts in class who have kindly shared some of their knowledge with us over the week.
Here is a snapshot of our learning...

Language, Communication and Literacy Development: We have enjoyed listening to our new class story 'Dear Dinosaur' by Chae Strathie and responding with ideas and suggestions to events that take place within the story. We have focused on articulating our ideas and thoughts in well-formed sentences.

On Thursday we dressed up as our favourite book characters for world book day and enjoyed sharing well known stories that our characters appear in. Continuing our learning on traditional tales stories, characters and settings from last term, we completed our book cover design and began to make up our own stories beginning with 'Once upon a time' and finished with 'The end.'
We understand that a story is made up and we can use our imagination to allow funny or amazing adventurous events happen.

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. A huge well done to everyone making great progress in our last assessment, we are working hard at our new reading and writing challenges in our new groups. We have also continued with daily handwriting activities this week as we have focused on forming the zig zag letters v w z and x more accurately.

Mathematical Development: Our mathematical focus this week has been measurement and in particular length, height and distance. We have used the mathematical vocabulary to compare objects and describe whether they are longer or shorter. We know we should use a baseline so that are objects are measured from the same starting point and have used non-standard units of measure (cubes) to explore measurement as a concept. In provision there has been some enthusiastic measuring of objects with tape measures and rulers!

Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Wellbeing: In 'My Happy Mind' we began our new unit of work called relate. We listened first to Rosie's story day and reflected on what was special about the Rosie's school day. We understood Rosie's favourite story was ' Oscars magnificent ears ' and why she loved that story so much. We then explored friendship and recognised what makes a good friend and how we can be a good friend. Working collaboratively we made a recipe for being a good friend listing the friendship quality ingredients.

In 'Heartsmart' we have started our new unit – I am a good friend. We learnt that we can all be super friends. We started the session by talking about superheroes, thinking about lots of different superheroes; including superman, wonder woman and batman. We discussed what a super hero does, we said they are kind, they save people, they are nice to people and have super powers.
Next we talked about how we can be a super friend, we thought of lots of ideas like being kind, sharing, being helpful, being loving and being forgiving.
We finished the session by designing our own super hero mask and saying why we are a super friend.
Boris says, "We are all Super-Friends!"
Bible link, "Friends always show their love." Proverbs 17:17

Understanding The World Development: This week we began our new unit of work: Salvation.
First we explored a range of different items set out on the table, a garden with soil, a tree, a man, a woman, an angel, three crosses made from sticks from the garden and some plastic flowers. We understand that every year Christians tell a very special story that is celebrated in church involving these items. As the story of Easter was told, each item was placed in the garden.

We looked at a selection of Easter garden photographs and discussed the similarities in each one. We discovered they all contained three crosses which we recognised as being the same in the picture when we read the story. Each had a tomb and a stone that had been rolled away. We liked the one with a candle in the tomb and thought it represented Jesus as a light in the world.
We made a small Easter garden in our small world area so we could retell the story over the coming weeks.

In our discussion time, discovering what we know about dinosaurs, our great dinosaur experts have shared:
Dinosaurs have sharp teeth.
Every dinosaur has a special defense against other dinosaurs.
T Rex's eat meat, that means they are carnivores.
Dinosaurs are extinct, that means they're in a museum.
People find fossils under the sand, they use paint brushes to brush off the dirt.
A triceratops eats plants, it's a herbivore.
A pterodactyl is a dinosaur that can fly.

Over the next few weeks we hope to build upon this knowledge as well as learning lots of new and exciting facts.

Expressive Arts and Design Development: We started our new music topic this week; Our World. We started the session by listening to 'Lovely Day' by Bill Withers, we all really enjoyed this song and some of us had even heard it before. We talked about how even though it is a slow song, it is happy and made us feel good. We listened carefully for the different instruments in the song and we heard a guitar, drums, tambourine, trumpets and we even thought we could hear a violin.
Next we explored pitch and talked about making our voices go higher and lower, we had fun listening to some different songs and exploring different pitches.
To end the session we enjoyed singing 'Old MacDonald' and 'Wheels on the Bus' we really loved using the actions to help us with the words.

For our big wall art we have looked at images of fossils and created some large fossil pictures using pasta for the bones and dabbed on paint for the sand effect. once these are dry, we will paint a white colour over the pasts to create the effect of fossilized bones. They look great so far, we can't wait to finish them.

Physical Development:Today we were joined by Harry from 'Chance to Shine Cricket' for our PE session. We enjoyed a great warm up, jogging around and on number command either, touched the ground, jumped and clapped, changed running direction, 4 star jumps, 5 high fives and 6 side steps. then we moved ono developing our cricket skills, practicing dropping the ball and catching it using two hands. we then progressed to throwing up into the air and catching. Once we had mastered this skill we progressed onto throwing the ball higher, clapping our hands and then catching. We learnt that we need to make a cup shape with our hands to make an accurate catch, the bigger the cup size. Then harry showed us how to hold the cricket bat correctly, with our dominant hand lower than our weaker hand to hit the ball. Thank you Mr. Dale for organising, we loved it!

Thank you reception Class for a super first week back
Have a great weekend
Mrs. Ward and the reception class team, Mrs. wainwright and Louise.