Welcome back Reception Class

Welcome back to a new term Reception class.

Roooaaaarrrr!!! We are all very excited to start our new theme for learning: 'Dinosaurs'

Language and Communication Development

We listened to our new class story 'Dear Dinosaur' by Chae Strathie where the two main characters, Max and T.Rex write to each other. We love T. Rex! He writes very funny letters and sounds like he has a great time in The City Museum when all the people have left for the day.

As we explored what is a dinosaur and how they lived we have learnt some new vocabulary. We have discovered that dinosaurs that ate plants were called herbivores, dinosaurs that ate meat were called carnivores and dinosaurs that ate both were called omnivores.

On Thursday, we celebrated world book day and our love of reading. We all looked incredible dressed as our favourite book characters. During the day we joined in lots of exciting activities, we particularly enjoyed the book scavenger hunt, looking for different characters and objects in a variety of class books. We also enjoyed listening to the ten minute story times. Over half term many of us created a story spoon which look amazing. We are a creative bunch!

Understanding the World Development

As we looked at different types of dinosaurs we noticed some similar physical features. Some had horns, spikes, frills and plates to help defend themselves against predators. Some had long necks to reach leaves and plants and some had powerful legs and tails to help them cover great distances at speed when hunting their dinner!

I think we have a lot of dinosaur experts who have helped us know the names of all the different dinosaurs. Wow!

Mathematical Development

Our learning focus this week was number bonds to 10. We explored this using a variety of representations progressing from concrete representations of physical objects to using pictorial representations, then finally using counters on a ten frame to show all the number bonds to 10. We have loved singing the song ''ten green bottles' throughout the week to see the number of bottles on the wall and then on the floor

Literacy Development

In our daily phonics sessions we have continued to recap known sounds and explored new sounds in listening, reading and writing activities. We have also practiced our formation of 'down letters' l, t, b, p and k in our daily handwriting activities.

For our writing task this week we have shared our exciting holiday news in small groups and wrote this up focussing on sentence structure, beginning our sentences with a capital letter, using clear finger spaces between our words and finishing our sentences with full stops.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

Boris asked us this week to consider what makes a good friend in our Heartsmart session. After looking at some images of superheroes we discussed what superheroes do and what we like about our favourite superhero characters. Boris explained we all have Heartsmart super powers because we are all super hero friends. We made a huge heart and filled it with the qualities a super friend has. We though our super powers were: being super helpful, being super kind, and being super loving. We then completed our activity by drawing ourselves as a super hero and wrote out our superpower.

Boris says, 'We are all Super-friends!'
Proverbs 17:17 'Friends always show their love.'

In our wellbeing time this week, we were very excited to invite our year 6 buddies to come and play in our class garden. It brought back some great memories for them from their time here 6 years ago.

Physical Development

In our PE session we really enjoyed playing some games, we are learning how to move in a range of different ways and at different speeds, as well as how to move around obstacles in our way. We started by standing in a square in the hall and when we heard "go" we had to walk to the other side of the square avoiding anybody that might be in our way. We talked about how we can go around the person or wait until they have moved. Next we played a statues game, we got into pairs and one of us had to be a statue whilst the other walked around the hall, avoiding the statues that might be in our way. Finally we played rabbits and rats, we split into two groups; half of us were rabbits and the other half rats, the rabbits had to get across the hall from one side to the other without getting tagged by a rat. We used our skills learnt throughout the lesson to dodge and avoid obstacles so we didn't get caught

Expressive Arts Development

In our music session we talked about spring. We thought about what changes happen during this season. We decided that the leaves come back on the trees, flowers grow, it gets warmer and lots of new animals are born. We read The Bog Baby and talked about what we would do if we found a baby animal whilst we were playing outside. We cast a spring spell on our classroom before completing some spring mindfulness colouring whilst listening to Four Seasons – Spring by Vivaldi.

For our big art we discussed how we know so much about dinosaurs and concluded that we know dinosaur shapes and sizes from fossils and dinosaur bones found in the ground. After looking at some dinosaur bone and fossil images and then created some large fossil pictures.

What a great first week back !
Mrs Ward and Mrs Wainwright