Reception Class News

Welcome back Reception Class to a new term, it has been lovely to see your smiling, exciting faces each morning and hear all your Easter adventures with your families.

This week we have started to explore our new topic 'Diverse World' and 'growing plants in the garden.' First we established what we knew about growing plants so we can build future knowledge on it. Over the week, we read the Camille and the Sunflowers and admired the illustration of the sunflower field with tall, glowing sunflowers facing towards the hot blazing sun.

Our story also has a character called Vincent, who we discovered went on to be a famous painter and was inspired to paint the sunflowers from the field when he displayed them in a brown vase. Next week we will continue to learn more about his artwork and hopefully be inspired to create our own version of his sunflower painting.

We also looked at how some plants start their life cycle as a seed from a parent plant and identified the conditions they needed to grow and thrive. Using the sunflower seeds kindly donated by Toby's mum, we planted up several sunflower seeds each, in pots and placed them in a sunny corner of the classroom with a nice drink of water to watch them germinate.

For our literacy task this week we have explored instructional writing: what are instructions?, where do we find them? and why we need them?, by looking at a few examples for a recipe and how to play a game. We imagined that if a visitor came to our classroom and was interested in our seed planting, we could create a useful set of instructions for them. Looking at how instructions were set out, we wrote a 'You will need' list first so that they would be able to get the correct resources ready. Then we talked about instructions using 'bossy words' at the start of sentences to instruct the person to what action they needed to do. We have completed most of our instructional sentences and hope to finish them next week.

We also began our new topic in music "Big Bear Funk" by listening to the song Big Bear Funk by Joanna Mangona, which is a song written for children to learn about, sing, dance and play Funk music. We discovered that funk music creates an intense groove by using a rhythm section where the guitar plays strong riffs and the bass line is repetitive and energetic, that it usually has a horn section and best of all makes us want to dance. We talked about whether we liked the song and the reasons why or why not, we also discussed the instruments that we could hear, which included trumpets, guitars, saxophones and voices.

The song is about funky monkeys, funky chickens and a funky bear, we pretended to be each of these animals whilst keeping the beat to the song. We began to learn the words to the song, using some actions to help us remember, we are looking forward to learning more about funk music as our term continues.

In Heartsmart we are learnt to differentiate between words that are true and untrue by recapping on the story of Boris the robot. We discussed some of different things that happened in the story, like what the scrap man says to Boris and how it made Boris feel. Then we talked about whether the things that the Scrapman says about Boris are true, we decided that they were untrue and unkind.

Finally we looked at some phrases from the story and put a thumbs up or thumbs down if we thought it was true or untrue.
Boris says "Kind and true words fill our hearts."
The bible says "A lie has a short life, but truth lives on forever" Proverbs 12:19

Our focus for our mathematical development was exploring more complex patterns. Throughout the week we have discovered a huge range of patterns made from shapes, colours, sizes, actions and sounds. We have explored patterns in everyday objects around us, in flooring, bunting, fences, flowers etc. We are now confident to identify the pattern core by verbalising it and then the number of repeats. We then used ABC letter names to identify the core of the pattern and then identified pattern types using this method: AB pattern, ABC pattern and AAB and ABB patterns.

This week has also been first aid week and we have explored what first aid is and some of the things that we might need first aid for at school or home, like a grazed knee or a head bump. We explored some different examples of injuries and know that some we can fix ourselves with first aid and some injuries, like a broken bone or feeling unwell, we should visit a doctor or the hospital for extra help to make us better.

Using our dolls and teddies in class we watched and listened to the instructions on how to apply a plaster and give someone basic first aid. We washed our hands, wiped the graze clean and then applied a plaster. We discussed that sometimes we can feel quite upset when we have had an accident and how we feel much better when someone says kind words when they help us. Our dolls were very impressed with our first aid skills and are still wearing their lovely plasters!

And finally, in our physical development we started our first athletics lesson, warming up our body with the bean game. We then played partner tag in our main session, giving our partner three seconds head start before chasing them, once caught they had to perform three star jumps, then we switched roles. We the played corners and developed our skill of running at different speeds and changing direction to move towards the coloured corner when instructed.

We also split up into two teams and raced against each other, ensuring that we understood where the starting and finishing line was and to keep running to ensure we were over it. Not surprisingly, we have some super-fast runners, must have been inspired by the marathon madness with Mr Dale on Thursday afternoon. We thank the PTA for organising and our parents for generously donating our sponsorship money. We also wish Mr Dale the very best of luck for Sunday when he runs the London marathon and hopefully we may catch a glimpse of him on the TV.

Have a great weekend
Mrs Ward and the reception team