Reception Class News 31:03:23

And just like that, it is the end of another term Reception Class! This week we have enjoyed sharing our Easter learning with our parents for messy church crafts and completing tasks for our study work books to reflect our learning from this term about dinosaurs.

In our mathematical learning this week we have continued exploring subtraction, looking specifically at the number bonds to 10, using our knowledge of the part whole model to find the missing number structure. We began by singing 10 noisy parrots and used our fingers to show the number of parrots still in the tree (fingers upright) and parrots fallen from the tree (fingers bent down.) understanding that the fingers down had been taken away from the whole number and linked to the number bond 10. By the end of the week we were able to explore subtraction using number bonds in a more open ended context by deciding on the number to subtract and using the part whole model to explain our findings in a number sentence. This method gave us the opportunity to recombine the groups of counters to see the inverse relationship between adding and subtracting number bonds. Not all of us found this easy so we will need to revisit this concept next term.

In our music session we began by listening to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" sung by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. We learnt that this song is known as a Motown song and was made famous by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in 1967, but there are many different recordings of this song. We found some of them to listen to and compare. We had fun keeping the beat of the song and dancing to it together.

Then we continued to build our knowledge of instruments, in particular, the glockenspiel. We practiced our nursery rhymes from the past few weeks, trying really hard to play the correct note at the right time. Finally we had the opportunity to play our own beat on the glockenspiel, we took it in turns to play a beat for the rest of the children to copy.

This week in Heart Smart we are learning that we can choose to be kind to others even when they are not. We started the session by reading our 'Boris, The Robot' book.
Then we looked at the picture of the Scrapman and described him, we decided that he looked very grumpy. Next we talked about why we think that the Scrapman is so grumpy (e.g. He hasn't got any friends, people are unkind to him, he is jealous of Boris being loved by a family, and so on.)

We discussed that often when a person is grumpy or mean there is a reason why they feel that way. We thought about what we would do if the Scrapman was in our class. How would we treat him? We talked about how we should always treat people in a kind way, just like we would want to be treated. Even if they are mean and grumpy we should not be mean and grumpy back.

We discussed ways we can be kind to others even when they are grumpy e.g. we can smile, we can invite them to play, we can listen to them, etc. Finally we passed Boris around the circle and each had a turn to complete the sentence 'If I met the Scrapman I would...'

Boris says, 'We can always choose to be a kind friend.'
Bible link "Do what is right to other people. Love being kind to others. And live humbly, trusting your God." Micah 6:8

In our PE session we continued with our unit on developing our fine motor skills. We began by warming up our bodies, stretching them and travelling around the hall being different Mr Men characters. In our main session we played tag chase, trying to pull as many tags from each other as we could. Then we got into our house teams and raced against each other to see who could collect as many cones as possible, similar to the bean bag race last week. In our game session we revisited the elastic band around the beaker game from last week and collected as many Jenga pieces with a peg as possible in the time. We are definitely getting much quicker at this.

We are very excited for next term and can't wait to get into the garden to start planting up our seeds as we explore the theme of the diverse world and growing.

Have a restful and peaceful Easter Reception Class
Mrs Ward and the Reception team, Mrs Wainwright and Louise