Reception Class News 14: 10: 22

Happy Friday Reception Class! It has been another busy week and we have been fantastic learners, embracing everything we have encountered and giving it our best effort.

Let's share our learning adventures...

Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Wellbeing

This week in our 'My Happy Mind' session we learnt that our brains are incredible and that our brain is in our head.We started by talking about how our brains work and learnt that our brains send messages to other parts of our bodies to tell it what to do. We looked at a template of a brain where we could see squiggly lines, we learnt that these lines represent the messages sent by our brains. We found out that the more we practice things the stronger these lines get.
We had a great time making our own brain hats.

In HeartSmart we learnt to read facial expressions to understand how others are feeling and to talk about the things we love and describe how they make us feel.We started by looking at our Boris the robot story and focussing on the characters facial expressions, we could tell that some of them were happy, sad and cross and knew this because they were smiling, their mouths were turned down and they were frowning. We tried to copy some of these facial expressions ourselves.

Next looked at when Boris's heart was full and talked about why we thought it was full, because the family loved him. Then we sat in a circle and shared with each other what made our hearts full. Finally we drew a picture of our full hearts and coloured them in.
Boris says, 'When we notice our friends are feeling sad we can help to cheer them up.'
Bible reference: So comfort each other and give each other strength. 1 Thessalonians 5:11

Physical Development

In our PE session this week we learnt to dribble a ball with our feet, keeping good control and to trap the ball with our foot.We started our lesson with a game to warm up our bodies, we played dishes and domes; we split into two teams, a dishes team and a domes team, there were cones spread around the hall one team had to turn them upside while the other team had to make sure they were the right way up. This was great fun,and we loved the competition!For the main part of our session we worked in pairs, using a medium sized ball we practiced dribbling the ball in and around the space. Next,we took turns kicking the ball to each other and trying to stop it with our foot before kicking it back to our partner. We learnt that trapping means to stop the ball with our foot and that to be good at it we had to keep our eye on the ball.

Mathematical Development

Our mathematical focus this week has been to compare quantities of non-identical objects. We were able to build upon last week's knowledge of identifying more, fewer or the same to match objects to compare quantities. We have used cubes to represent groups of objects and then compared to see how may more or fewer each group had in comparison. We understand that objects in groups do not have to be the same to compare them.

Expressive Arts and Design

In our music this week we started the session by listening to Happy Birthday by Stevie Wonder. We all really liked this song as it was so happy and upbeat. We said that it reminded us of our own birthdays and made us smile.We then enjoyed keeping the beat to the song which was quite a fast and funky beat.Finally we carried on with singing our song 'This Old Man' which we have gotten really good at! We will hopefully do a recording of this next week to share with you all.

Understanding the world Development

In our RE session we listened to the story of David and Goliath from the 'Children of God Storybook Bible' by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and thought about what the good news was in this story. We though that David was brave and had stood up to someone who wasn't being nice to others. We understood that he felt God was on his side and helped him to defeat the giant Goliath.
After listening to the song 'My God is so big, so strong and so mighty' by Ruth Harms Calkin we discussed why Christians believe God is strong and powerful. We though about some of the words sung and understood that they believe he is a mighty helper who is kind and loving.

Communication and Language

We have enjoyed listening to some exciting stories this week, especially a tale of two feathers as we learnt some new vocabulary and all about some nocturnal and diurnal animals.

Literacy Development

In our literacy development we have continued with our daily Read Write Ink phonics sessions. This week we have practiced reading and writing the sounds: r, j, v, y and w. For our writing activity we have written our first complete sentence which we are extremely proud of. Building upon last weeks labelling of some of the animals from Mr gumpy's Outing, we chose the dog and sat him on a log! I think you can guess what our sentence was. We introduced 'finger space ace' so that each time we wanted to write the next word in our sentence we used our finger spacer ace to help us know where to start. Fabulous work Reception Class, you are writers!

We have ended our fantastic week dressed in our own clothes to support our PTA with their fundraising events. A huge thank you to our families for the inventive filled jars donated for the jar tombola.

Have a wonderful weekend
Mrs Ward and the reception team, Mrs Wainwright and Louise