Reception Class News 12.01.24

Welcome back Reception Class and a very happy new year to you all.
You have made me a very proud teacher with how quickly you have settled back into your learning activities.

Let us share...
Our new theme this term is 'Time travel' and our specific focus is a look at traditional tales. We understand that they have been retold through generations to become the written stories they are today. In our language and communication development, we enjoyed listening to the tale of The Little Red Hen retold by Paul Galdone and joined in with the repeated refrains.

Linking with this story, in our expressive arts and design development, we learnt some new songs, sung to familiar tunes, about the Little Red Hen. We even managed to add some Makaton actions to help with our singing and performed an impromptu performance to some visitors. Great singing job Reception Class!

In our mathematical development, we have focused on counting up to 8 objects and showing them using concrete representations on a ten frame. We explored that we could arrange our objects in different ways on our ten frame but they still represented 8. For example, 5 counters on the top row and 3 underneath makes 8 altogether and the reverse of this: 3 and 5 and 4 and 4.
In our journal work, we showed our level of understanding by representing 8 through drawings in as many ways as possible.

In our mastery maths afternoon sessions, we continued to use our perceptual subitising skills (seeing the quantity without counting them) by moving dots in a line to a focus on dots on standard dice arrangements. We used spatial language to describe the arrangements of dots, including our new word diagonal to explain the relationship of the dots on the 2 and 3 face of the dice.

We have certainly 'jumped into' our literacy sessions this week with Juniper Jupiter, our superhero story to inspire our writing. First we explored some items and correctly guessed that a superhero would wear or use them. We then thought about if we could be a superhero, what would our character name be and what superpower would we have. Well reception class, you are not short of imagination, you came up with some amazing names and superpowers!
Over the rest of the week, we practiced our sentence accuracy and really took on the challenge of writing lots of independent sentences using the new vocabulary explored in the text. Well done Reception Class, you

In our physical development session with Coach James, we practiced our kicking skills and developed our ball control by playing a game of football, trying to score a goal as well as hit a moving target.

As part of our understanding the world development, we had our first forest school session with Mr Hadfield, which we were all very excited about! First, we looked at some animal homes and animal skeletons using some of the clues such as teeth to see if they were a meat eater (carnivore) or a plant eater (herbivore). We correctly guessed a fox, lion and a roe deer. Would you believe we put our hands inside the lion's mouth and touched it's sharp teeth! Mr Hadfield introduced us to his hedgehog and we discussed how it likes to get warm and sleep for part of the winter (hibernate) and agreed to the challenge of making him a warm shelter that was disguised from other predators. I think you'll agree, they look great hedgehog homes. At the end we practiced using the fire steels to make dragon sneezes in preparation for some marshmallow toasting next week. we can't wait!

Today we started our new RE unit on prayer. Using the storybook 'Clever Cub Sings to God' by Bob Hartman, based on Psalm 104, we were delighted to discover that there is a whole book of songs in the Bible called Psalms and many of them were written by King David. The Psalms can be sung as prayers of praise to God. In Clever Cub's story today was a song, it was his prayer of praise telling God how incredible and amazing God is and thanking God for creation. We each created a picture of the things he thought were amazing, so we could created a small book of praise.

In our wellbeing time, we joined our year 6 buddies on the track for their daily mile exercise and enjoyed running a few quick laps to keep us warm. It certainly has been a week to wrap up and keep warm. We are excited to see if our predictions for snow next week are accurate.

And finally, as part of our personal, social and emotional development development we thought about things that are important to us and why. Over the week, we have used our calming breathing strategy to remind ourselves that at times when we feel emotional we can use this technique to help calm us and regulate our emotions.

Have a lovely weekend, rest up and I will see you Monday
Your class teacher