Reception Class News 28:04:23

Another busy week in Reception Class !
Let's share in our learning...

Expressive Arts and Design Development: In music we started our session by listening to 'I Feel Good' by James Brown, we learnt that this song was released in 1965 and that James Brown was one of the first musicians to perform Funk music and is probably the most famous. We talked about what instruments we could hear, these included; trumpets, trombones and saxophones as well as guitars, keyboard and drums. Some of us had heard the song before and said that we really liked it, a few of us didn't really like the song and said that sometimes James Brown's singing included shouting and screaming!

Next we continued to learn the song Big Bear Funk, we learnt that some of the lines in the song follow the same rhythm and that some were harder to sing with the music than others, we kept practicing and enjoyed adding some actions to be the different animals in the song, such as a bear, a monkey and a chicken.

We have continued to create our Van Gogh big art work which we are sure you will agree are absolutely stunning! Using large pieces of board we drew out outlines of the vase and arrangement of sunflowers and then carefully began to apply the colours in stages, allowing the painting to dry before adding the textured background. We are so proud of them.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development:This week in Heart Smart we are learning to be kind and encouraging to others. We began the session by thinking about the lies that the Scrapman tells about Boris; he belongs in the scrapyard, the children don't want him etc. We also thought about how these lies made Boris feel; sad, scared, worried.

Next we talked about how we could cheer Boris up, what kind words could we say to make him feel special and loved, the children came up with some great ideas. Finally we wrote cards to Boris, we drew a lovely picture and included our kind words as a message. We are excited to see if Boris gets our cards and if it cheers him up!

Boris says "It's great to tell others how special they are."
Bible link ' And so encourage one another and help one another, just as you are now doing' 1 Thessalonians 5:11.

In our my happy mind session we read 'Ernie's Birthday Tree', where Ernie liked to set himself himself goals and then tried his best to achieve them by not giving in and remembering how it feels to achieve personal goals. We then thought about the goals we can set for ourselves and how we might go about achieving them.

Literacy Development: This week we have continued to complete our instructional writing for planting seeds and caring for them, remembering to use 'bossy words' at the start of sentences to instruct the person to what action they needed to do. In our daily phonics, we have continued to learn new special friend sounds and apply them in our reading and writing activities. In our handwriting tasks we have continued to practice 'around sounds' c a o g and q.

Mathematical Development: Our focus for learning this week was recognising,continuing and building more complex patterns. Welearnt about ABBand AAB patterns specifically, where wediscoveredthat patterns can be formed using variousshapes, colours, sizes, actions and sounds.

Understanding the World Development: This week we explored 'what is a flower?' and 'what is a plant?' we began by sharing what we alreadyknow about plants and flowers to determine our starting point for learning. Using information texts we explored the different images and explanations and came to the conclusion that a plant consists of roots, stems and leaves and can have flower buds, a flower is the part of the plant that produces seeds, has it's own colour and smell which is different from the rest of the plant. We made observational drawings of a plant, from the ones we have grown from seed and as part of one of our literacy tasks we labelled up the different parts.

Physical Development: This week in PE we developed our skill of jumping, first with 1 foot to 2 feet and then 2 feet to 2 feet, landing with soft knees and using our arms to power us forward.We began our session with a warm up, playing traffic lights, using some of the skills we have developed over the past weeks, travelling safely around the space, travelling at different speeds and changing directions quickly and safely. In our main session we practiced jumping over a line, 2 feet to 2 feet, using our arms to power us forward and landing with really soft knees. Our challenge was to jump our own body length.

We then put our new skill into practice and played 'across the pond', taking turns in our teams to jump across the lily pads (hoops) in our pond (coned area) to bring back bugs (beanbags) from the other side.In our game session, we played 'fill your house' where each team had to take turns one at a time to jump two footed over a distance and balance in the hoop. The winning team managed to get all their team mates into the hoop without anyone stepping out of the hoop. Phew, who knew jumping was such exhausting work?

We look forward to next week and celebrating the Kings Coronation.
Don't forget to wear red, white or blue on Friday
Mrs Ward and the Reception team.