Reception Class News 17.11.23

Another busy week Reception Class, where you have worked hard and made me a very proud teacher of your achievements. Let us share our learning adventures...

Our week began with an introduction by Miss McCurrie to anti bullying week as part of our personal, social and emotional development and wellbeing. We spent time unpicking what bullying means. We explored what is 'being rude', what is 'being mean' and finally what is 'bullying.' We understand that being rude is to do or say something without thinking that it will upset or hurt someone in some way. Being mean is to do or say something to hurt someone's feelings on purpose. Bullying is when someone says or does something hurtful on purpose and they do it repeatedly. We read a lovely story called kind hands and made our anti bullying pledge to use kind hands and words in our class.

On Tuesday, we joined the school in celebrating odd sock day. We loved sharing our odd socks with our friends and enjoyed listening to the story Simon Sock. Simon wondered why he was never chosen to be worn, until he was told it was because he was odd. He searched for someone to be with so he could be in a pair but he eventually realised he was happy being odd and being friends with banana instead. We have shared many stories across the week about how unique and wonderfully made each one of us is.

Our focus for our mathematical development this week was learning about one more within five. Using lots of role-play and first, then and now story structures, we explored adding one more and explaining our work in stem sentences. We recognised that the next number we counted was one more than the previous number. We encountered some difficulty transferring this new skill into our journal work and applying (drawing) our one more stories and so will revisit this concept again next week to consolidate it before moving on.

In our literacy development, we continued to explore our story 'Star in the Jar' by Sam Hay as well as a good example of a similar rewritten story. Recalling the story characters; Opening Octopus, Build up Bear, Problem Penguin and Ending Elephant we look at how the story was made up of four parts. Using our 'Wise Owl' writing prompts, we checked to see the good features of a written piece of work, capital letters, finger spaces, good sentence openers, describing words and full stops. We made an opening octopus plan with visual prompts and sentence openers to help us retell and write the beginning of our story.

Quickly recapping that Christmas is a celebration of Jesus' birthday, we continued our RE unit of work about Christmas and how Christians celebrate Jesus' birthday. Sharing stories about new babies, we explored some of the things that a new baby needs now compared to when Jesus was born, wrapped up in swaddling and placed in a manger. Birthdays are always a good topic for discussion in class, so we shared with each other how we each celebrated our birthdays in remembrance of the day we were born. This we recorded in our class RE floor book.

We very much enjoyed our session with Coach James who taught us how to play tag rugby as part of our physical development. In our other PE session we began to learn about dance, focusing on changing the speed, style and emotions of our dance to a familiar song. Warming our bodies up to prepare ourselves for exercise we played 'action people', pretending to be different characters, moving our bodies at different speeds and in different positions.

And finally, dare I mention it...it is that time of year where we are fast approaching nativity season! So we have begun to learn some of our nativity songs as part of our expressive arts and design development.

We finished our week by dressing up in our own clothes and donated to Children in Need. Thank you for your generosity. 

Have a great weekend everyone.
For those who we have greatly missed this week, due to poorliness, we hope to see you well on Monday and ready for another week of learning.

Mrs Ward and
Mrs Wainwright