Reception Class News 13: 01: 23

Reception class, it has been a busy week as we have completed our first full week since the Christmas break.

We have worked incredibly hard and understandably we had some tired faces today.
Let's share in our learning...

Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Wellbeing
In our my happy mind activity this week, we identified ways to be thankful. Building upon last week's session where we thought about thinks we are thankful for, we though of how we showed we were thankful. Recapping lots of examples given, we said we showed we are thankful by giving hugs, kisses, saying thank you, helping someone in return, singing thanks like when we sing our prayer to say thank you to God for our food and even showing thankfulness in dance!

In this week's Heart Smart we learnt that all families are important and special. To start the session we talked about Boris' family, we know that in Boris' family there are two children and a dad. They love Boris and fill his heart with love. With our talking partners we talked about who is in our families. Next we played a parachute game, we made a circle and each held a part of the parachute to keep it up. The aim of the game was to listen carefully to a description, for example "Run under the parachute if you have a brother/sister." If we heard a description of our family, we ran under the parachute to the other side.

We had great fun and learnt that all of our families are different, some of us have brothers, sisters, brothers and sisters or sometimes no siblings. We know that some families are small and some are big, some are loud and some quiet, we learnt that each family is unique and that makes them special. Boris says, "Families are important to help us feel safe and loved."

Our Bible link "Do everything in love." 1 Corinthians 16:14

Expressive Arts and Design Development
In our music session this week we focused on lullabies. We thought that a lullaby is a song that we sing to a baby to help them to go to sleep. We listened to a lullaby from South Africa called Thula Baba by Hiabalela Ensemble. We really liked the song and said it made us feel happy. We said that we could hear a xylophone as well as maracas and a drum, we learnt that the drum had a special name; a djembe drum.

We decided that it would be difficult to get to sleep whilst listening to this lullaby as it was quite loud, we spoke about how we normally sing lullabies quietly. However we learnt that in South Africa mothers would normally always carry their babies wrapped closely to their heart and would have swayed slowly whilst singing this song, we all stood up and slowly swayed to the music which helped us to understand how a baby would be rocked to sleep. To end our lesson we enjoyed learning a traditional lullaby; rock a bye baby.

Continuing on from our work last week exploring different types of building and homes through the beautiful artwork of Paul Horton, we looked at some photographs of buildings and made a design to build our own from junk modelling materials. Once our design was complete we got out the resources needed and began our construction securing our joins with masking tape and glue. we chose bright colours like Paul to paint our homes, so they would stand out. They look fabulous!

Mathematical Development
This week our learning focus was to count up to 8 objects and show them using concrete representations including the ten frame. This is our first time of using counters as a representations of an amount. We have used some of our classroom minibeast creatures to help us with our counting, an ant with 6 legs and a spider with 8. Whilst we could find creatures that had 2, 4, 6 and 8 legs in our basket we couldn't find any with 3, 5 and 7! We thought this was because legs come in pairs. In our journal work we used the ten frame to show the different ways to show 8.
We have also practiced the skill of counting on from a known number to find out how many objects all together.

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 begun to include daily handwriting activities into our week and we are definitely shining our lights. Miss Haynes, from year was so impressed with our formation of our around letters : c, a, o, d and g and our attempts at the down letters: l, t and i this week.

We have really enjoyed our talk for writing story 'The Gingerbread man' and have created some wonderful story maps to help with our retelling. We are brilliant at retelling this with great expression and intonation. We have really mastered the Makaton actions to help with our retelling too. Fabulous job Reception Class, you make me so proud!

Communication and Language Development
We have really enjoyed listening to stories from our reading challenge basket across the week, especially Bumble Bear. Bee school sounds fun! Our poem of the week, this week has been 'Slow train, getting slower' by Michael Rosen. We feel just like the train at the end of a busy day!

Understanding of the World Development
On Wednesday, we were very excited to join Mr. Hadfield and our buddies for forest schools. The promise from last week of making dragon sneezes has kept us going! We enjoyed a wonderful story called Tadpoles promise and then went outside for our task, finding items to put in our treasure box. We had to find something crunchy, brown, round, yukky, heavy and something wow!
And finally we made dragon sneezes with fire steels around the fire pit circle. Best day ever!

Physical Development
In our PE session we continued with our unit of gymnastics, warming up by playing the letters game, jumping one place forward if we heard a letter sound that was in our name. Once our muscles were all warmed up we all helped to safely carry the PE mats onto the floor area to practice log rolls, keeping our bodies straight as possible, hands by our sides and rolling. Building upon last week's work of rocking we created a sequence of a roll, a rock and then a jump, ensuring that we jumped with our feet together, knees bent and landed on two feet, using our arms for balance. We completed our session by doing two footed jumps across the hall to see who could do it in the least amount of jumps. The jury is still out on this one as there were a few anomalies in the counting. The lowest number given was 4, for our big hall!

Maybe we'll practice that again next week!

Have a well earned rest this weekend
Mrs Ward and the Reception Team, Mrs wainwright and Lousie