Reception class weekly news 17:06:22

Another great week Reception Class

It has been an unusual week this week, with new starters spending time in our classroom but it has given us opportunity to learn in different environments in our school. 

Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Within Heartsmart this week, we explored the topic I can challenge. Boris gave us a new word to learn – persevere. We talked about what that means and how we can think about not giving up when things get tricky. To begin with, we got into teams and completed a challenge to pass the bean bag as quickly as possible. We recapped our learning and then went on an adventure to the forest school area. We completed a variety of tasks all around the topic of bees. By the end of the activities we talked about the challenges we faced, and what helped us to not give up. This links to the bible quote, 'Endurance produces character and character produces hope.' Romans 5:4.

Physical Development

In PE with Mrs Swan, we continued to practice for our sports day! Starting by warming up our bodies, we stretched out pretending we had a large pieces of paper in front of us and a paintbrush, painting large circles and shapes stretching as we went. Then we talked about balancing and how we need to move to be able to balance something, we decided that it would be best to move slowly and carefully. putting our theory into practice we balanced a bean bag on different parts of our bodies whilst standing still, before trying to move around the hall whilst balancing it.

Finally, we learnt about egg and spoon races and had a go at this whilst in relay teams like last week. This was great fun and some of us developed a speedy technique without dropping our egg!

Our theme for our second PE lesson was 'Why do bees matter?' To warm up our bodies, we listened to a piece of music called the flight of the bumblebee, and moved our bodies in a variety of ways. We took on our next challenge to act out what bees do to feed pollen to their larvae and move pollen to different plants. In the hall we worked quickly to move bean bags to the hive where the larvae were, and to a variety of flowers. At the end of the lesson we enjoyed working with a partner to stretch and balance together. Great work Reception, you were definitely busy bees throughout the lesson!

Expressive Arts and Design

In music we enjoyed singing, beginning by warming up our voices by moving our faces to stretch them before pretending to bake a cake using our voices to make sound effects.Once warmed up, we sang Barney Bear is walking to the park – we made a circle that Barney Bear could move around singing before choosing a friend to join him. Finally we sang a rock and roll song "Shake Your Paws Little Teddy Bear." whilst dancing along to the beat.

Mathematical Development

Our focus for our mathematical learning this week has been composing and decomposing shapes. We explored how shapes can be made up or taken apart by recognising that a shape can have other shapes within it, just like a number can. Using a range of different shapes in practical activities, we were able to develop our skills of prediction and proving our understanding.

Literacy Development

In our daily phonics sessions, we have continued to consolidate our set 2 sounds and revisited 'ar' 'or' and 'air' special friend sounds. We continue to be proud of how we can quickly read and write polysyllabic words, as we understand how to use of units of breath.
Our focus for handwriting and letter formation has been the down letters: n, r, u and y.
We have applied our writing skills into writing our fathers day cards as neatly as we could.

Communication and Language

To develop our communication skills this week we have shared our minibeast creatures created from recycling materials with the class. We focused on speaking in full sentences explaining our design, the materials used and how it was constructed.

Understanding the World Development

The weather has been just fabulous this week, so we have made the most of it by being out in the garden and forest school as much as possible which has led to some great minibeast discoveries.
In the garden we have found a millipede, some snails, woodlice and some very wiggly worms and discussed the different environments within the garden where we can find them. We were very careful to make sure we returned them to where we found them. No minibeasts were harmed in our investigation!

Have a lovely weekend
Enjoy the sunshine
Mrs Ward and Mrs Wainwright