Reception Class News 30/06/23

Reception Class, we have had another exciting week of learning.
Let's share with our families and wider school community...

Understanding the World Development: This week has been a fascinating week as we have watched our caterpillars go through stages of their life cycle as they made their way to the top of the pot and hung themselves upside down. During Tuesday, we were able to witness them transform themselves into pupas. Once this was complete, we were able to move them carefully into the butterfly habitat in preparation for the next stage of their lifecycle. We are counting down the days to see how long before they emerge from their pupae as butterflies, as it can be anywhere between seven to fourteen days. Our prediction is ten days. We are very excited about this!

In our RE learning we have continued to explore the concept of creation and the understanding that we all have a responsibility to care for God's world. Not only is this a Christian belief, but one shared by people of many faiths and people of no faiths. We listened to the story of creation from 'The Lion Storyteller Bible' by Bob Hartman and discussed some of the illustrations alongside the text. We then created our own water coloured image of world and then carefully drew the different elements relating to the different events of the creation story. We will complete these next week as we would like to share them with the whole school as part of our wider conversation about caring for God's world as part of our courageous advocacy project for next year.

Communication and Language Development: This week has been a great week for learning and understanding scientific words as part of our learning on the lifecycle of a butterfly and recalling words that we have used in the past that have the same meaning.

Literacy Development: Our writing tasks this week have short burst sentences about what we have seen from our caterpillars in real time and then challenging ourselves to write additional information that we have gathered from our class text 'Caterpillar Butterfly' by Vivian French as we followed the little girls journey of discovery about the lifecycle of a butterfly from her lived experience in her granddad's garden.

Physical Development: This week we have had a fantastic practice for our Sports Day event next week, where we have mastered the obstacle course, bean bag race and egg and spoon race. We are praying for a calm weather day as our eggs are rather lightweight and love blowing off our spoons in light breezes! We hope you are able to join us for this on Wednesday at 10am.

Mathematical Development: This week we have consolidated our knowledge and understanding of composing and decomposing shapes and in particular locating various shapes and sizes of shapes hidden in images. In practical activities we have used small shapes and joined them to create medium and larger versions of the same shape.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development: In Heartsmart this week we learnt to keep trying when something is difficult. Whilst sat in a circle, we talked about how in the story Boris gets stuck when he tries to make a cake for the family, we discussed what Boris could do next time so he doesn't struggle, we decided that Boris could have asked for help with the cake or used a recipe book.
We each took it in turns to talk about a time when we have been stuck or we've found something tricky, we then thought of ways we could fix the problem.

Boris says, 'Everyone needs help sometimes.'
Bible reference: Don't give up, because you will get a reward for your good work. 2 Chronicles 15:7

Expressive Arts and Design Development: This week in our music session, we listened to 'Flight of the bumblebees' which is a piece of music composed by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1900. We were surprised that even though there were no words and the music was only made using instruments we could imagine a story whilst listening to the music. The fast violins sounded just like the buzzing of bees and we imagined bees flying around fast, maybe trying to escape from danger or working hard collecting nectar and returning to their hive. It was great fun to use our imagination whilst listening to the piece of music.

Have a super weekend
Mrs Ward and the Reception Class team, Mrs Wainwright and Louise