Reception Class News 18: 11: 22

Another fantastic week Reception Class.

This week was Anti Bullying week and we have explored what friendships are and are not. Playing a game of yes and no we chose what we thought was the right thing to do to a set of questions. We understand that treating others like we would like to be treated is called respect. Respect is thinking and acting in a positive way to ourselves and others. We also enjoyed reading ‘Mine’s Bigger than Yours! By Jeanne Willis. Well, we were not very happy with scary monsters’ behaviour and this led us to a great discussion about what bullying looks like and what qualities a good friend should have.
Let us share in the rest of our learning

In our Physical Development, we learnt that we could travel safely and creatively in a space and show different levels when we travel. We started our session by talking about what animals move at a low level, like snakes and crocodiles, medium level, like tigers and monkeys and high level like lions leaping, giraffes and elephants.

For our warmup we moved to the music, trying to keep in time with the music and each other, once we had finished, we noticed that our hearts were beating faster and we were breathing harder, this is how we know our warmup has worked. Next, we practiced travelling to the music and being different animals at different levels. Finally, we split into two groups, an audience group and a performance group, we watched each group before telling the performers what we really liked about it and what they could do to improve on their performance.

This week in our Mathematical Development, we have explored finding one less than a given number within 5 using concrete objects and pictures to help us. Building upon our experience of using dirt, then and now story language we explained how many we had to begin with, then how many we had taken away and how many were left. When we represented our one less stories in our journal pictorially, we understand that we cross one out to show it has been taken away and then we can see how many are left.

Over the past few weeks in our Language and Communication and Literacy Development, we have enjoyed listening to our Talk for Writing story ‘The little red hen.’ This week we have developed our own story map and added actions to retell the story. We have started to use intonation in our voices for the different characters and parts of the story.

In our Personal, Social and Emotional Development, we are learning to talk about how we demonstrate different emotions. We started our Heartsmart the session by talking about what are emotions. We explained that emotions are feelings like, happy, sad, angry etc. We even decided that sometimes we can have muddled feelings or mixed emotions and this is okay.

We looked at the Boris our robot and know that he is special because he has a heart. We did some jogging and running on the spot to get our hearts beating faster so that we could feel them. We learnt that our hearts are important as the keep the blood pumping around our bodies, they also help us to feel emotions. Next, we looked at some pictures of different emotions and tried to show them by using our faces; sad, happy, excited and angry.

Boris says, “When our hearts are happy, we are happy.”

Bible link “Happy heart is like good medicine.” Proverbs 17:22

In our ‘My Happy Mind’ session we talked about some of the positive character strengths that we have seen in some of our My Happy Mind stories. These strengths are love and kindness, teamwork and friendship, bravery and honesty, exploring and learning and a love of life and our world.
We discussed that during our Charlie’s Rainbow Adventure story the characters showed good teamwork when helping to get Charlie home. We talked about when we have seen good teamwork in our classroom. We know that during our story with Betty and Bertie the characters showed love and kindness to each other. We also talked about times we have seen someone showing love and kindness in our classroom. We talked about how we will try to show all of these character strengths in our classroom and can talk about them in our next My Happy Mind session.

In our Understanding the World Development, we began our new RE unit Incarnation, exploring the key question: Why do Christians perform nativity plays at Christmas? We began our lesson by looking at our class bible as the story we were about to explore happened a long time ago. Sitting in a circle and using the wooden characters from our nativity set, we listened to the story, adding the different characters as they appeared.

We considered why Jesus was the most important person in this story, because he was God’s son, his gift to us. We understand that Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’ birthday.

Mrs Ward and the Reception Class team