Reception Class News 04:02:22

Reception class, thank you for another week of fantastic learning.
Let us share what we have been doing...

Understanding the World Development

This week we have celebrated World Harmony Interfaith Week and explored how different religions practiced around the world have a common rule that they follow called the 'Golden Rule'. After listening carefully to each religions rule we discussed how they each gave a message of how to treat other people, as they would want people to treat them. When we thought about the qualities we would need to create our own class 'Golden rule' and decided upon kindness, gentleness, helpfulness and being able to love other people. With these characteristics in mind we created individual Golden rules that we would try to live by in our daily life.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

In our Heartsmart session we learnt that we can show love to others when they need help, after Boris asked us, can we think of ways to help others? In our discussion time we talked about ways we can help others, these included; being kind, helping our friends to build models, helping our friends if they are sad, helping our families at home; in the kitchen, to tidy up, looking after our animals and pets. We talked about who helps us and had some fantastic answers; our friends cheer us up, our families help us at home and our teachers help us to learn in school.

Boris asked us to think about how we know if someone needs our help, we came up with some great ideas; they look upset, they have their head down, they look like they're struggling and they might actually ask us for our help. We really enjoyed drawing ourselves helping other people and all had some lovely and kind ways to be helpful! Boris says "We can show others we love them by helping them when they need help"
This links to Philippians 2:4 "Do not be interested only in your own life, but be interested in the lives of others."

We are sad not to have met up with our buddies this week for our wellbeing time, however we took advantage of the glorious afternoon sunshine and started to prepare our garden for spring. Gathering up the last of the fallen leaves and weeding out the borders, we noticed our first daffodils shooting out of the ground, what a very welcome sight! Our resident mole has been very busy making us lots of mud piles, sadly on our little hill we like to roll down, so we have been busy scooping it all up and adding it to the borders.

Literacy Development

In our daily phonics sessions we have continued to recap known sounds and explored new sounds in listening, reading and writing activities. We have also practiced our formation of 'around letters'
c a o d g q in our daily handwriting activities as we can find the anticlockwise motion of the letters tricky and can often form them backwards.

In our talk for writing we have moved onto the innovation stage and started to change story characters and settings into our writing ideas. This has been a popular choice in our independent learning time and we have enjoyed listening to created stories that have been teacher scribed throughout the day.In our other writing activities we have been tried to become more independent, writing short captions for images of characters from our class stories using all the skills we have developed in our writing toolbox: rehearsing what we want to write, sounding out each word and using finger spaces so each word can be easily read. Great job reception class.

Physical Development

In our PE session this week we had great fun joining in a yoga activity that helped us to consolidate some of our of our gymnastic skills we have learnt so far as it required us to use balance and control to hold different poses and use rocking and rolling movements to express ourselves as characters in the yoga story. We definitely had huge smiles on our faces as we realised that we knew how to use a skill taught in a different discipline and apply it to another.

Mathematical Development

Our focus for learning this week was to combine two groups to find the whole number using the part-whole model we first encountered in the autumn term. We have certainly become more confident in identifying each part and then moving the two parts into the whole to find out how many objects altogether. We explored if we could still identify the whole and the parts if we turned the model in different orientations and discovered that it doesn't matter which way the model faces, the parts remain the same and we can combine them to find the whole number.

Communication and Language Development

We have continued to a wide range of story books and have really enjoyed re-reading some of our class favourites throughout the week, which allows us to join in saying key phrases together, which we love to do. This week we have also been practicing explaining our mathematical answers in stem sentences (full sentences) to explain how many objects we have in the first part of a part, part whole model, how many objects in the second part and then how many objects we have altogether. This have proved tricky across the week, but with lots of practice we are improving.

Creative Arts and Design Development

As part of our picture news worship we were asked to design a pudding for the Queen's platinum jubilee. We discussed some of the options she might enjoy and then set about our design in a drawing. I think she would be very impressed with some of the pudding ideas and the special names we gave them.

In our music session this week, we chose to sing some of our favourite worship songs that we have been learning, especially the golden rule song about love. It is such a powerful message to share with everyone.

Have a lovely weekend
Mrs Ward and Mrs Wainwright