Reception Class news 27/09/24

This week has been full of exciting activities and learning moments!
Here's a little insight into what we've been up to...

Physical Development: In our PE session with Coach James, we focused on throwing with accuracy. We began with a warm-up, including stretches like the flamingo stretch (standing on one leg), the giraffe stretch (standing tall with arms up), and moving our arms in circles like a helicopter. Next, we played The Floor is Lava, where we had to get to safe zones (hoops) when Coach James called out the signal. The main part of the session involved practicing accurate throwing. We recapped that to throw accurately, we need to look where we want the object to land, throw underarm, and not throw too hard. We worked in teams to throw bean bags into hoops and challenged ourselves by taking a step back after each successful throw. We ended with a fun game of Sharks and Minnows to cool down.

Mathematical Development: This week, we built on our knowledge of counting to 3 and moved on to counting to 4. We linked counting four concrete objects to their pictorial representations and finally connected them to the abstract numeral 4. A new tool, the five-frame, was introduced, which helps us visualize numbers and match quantities to numerals. We used cubes to represent objects in our math journals, placing them on the five-frame to represent different numbers. We now understand that the last number counted represents the total number of objects in the group. Great job, Reception Class!

Understanding The World: This week, we explored the importance of names and how special they are to us. We learned that Christians believe everyone's name is written on the palm of God's hand (Isaiah 49:6). We made "All About Me" name plates, decorated with our favourite colours and things. We also thought about the different names for God, such as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. We created human figures to represent these and decorated them.

We were very excited to make apple crumble this week, using apples from the school orchard that we picked last week! After peeling and chopping the apples, we topped them with a crumble mixture and baked them. The best part? Enjoying our delicious crumble in the afternoon.
The verdict-it was the best we've ever tasted!

Expressive Arts and Design: In music this week, we listened to Sing by The Carpenters. This song was quite different from the faster songs we listened to in previous sessions. It had a slow, calm rhythm, with a lady singing and a choir of children joining in at the end. We recognized instruments like the flute, drums, piano, violin, and triangle. We loved how the music made us feel calm and peaceful. Afterward, we had fun learning the words and actions to Pat-a-Cake and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, singing and dancing along!

Personal, Social, and Emotional Development: During this week's well-being session, we talked about things that bug us. We discussed what it means to feel bugged-when something makes us feel a little grumpy or cross. We shared with our talking partners things that bug us, like when someone snatches, when we don't want to wake up in the morning, or when we fall over. As a group, we discussed how to be good listeners by looking at the person speaking and not talking over them. To finish, we talked about what we can do when we feel grumpy, such as calm breathing or counting to help us calm down. Our well-being activity was counting forwards or backwards from a number to help us relax.

This week in Heartsmart we recapped on Boris story. We then considered the different materials and objects that he was made from and what they would normally be used for. We identified the different shapes we could see in Boris, such as rectangles, circles, squares and heart shapes. Using a variety of boxes, tubes, bottle tops, buttons and foil and anything else we could find we made our own Boris robot.We referred back to our creation story in RE to understand our Bible link for this lesson:
In the beginning God created the sky and the earth. Genesis 1:1

Literacy development: This week, we continued exploring our story 'The Something' and introduced a similar story called 'Dan and the Ball'. We loved listening to the story song that accompanied Dan and the Ball, which helped us to use some of the story's key vocabulary in our writing. We have been practicing sentence accuracy, focusing on using capital letters, finger spaces, and full stops. Excitingly, many of us managed to write some simple sentences all by ourselves! It's been amazing to see the children's confidence in their writing grow as they apply their phonics knowledge and begin to form their own sentences. Great job, Reception Class, our future writers are shining!

It's been a fantastic week of learning and growth. We are so proud of how hard everyone is working and can't wait to see what next week brings!

Have a lovely weekend