Welcome Back Reception Class 10:06:22

Welcome back Reception Class.

It is lovely to begin our last term together and explore one of my favourite topics: Minibeasts!

We have had a very busy week which we have ended with a fantastic theme day 'The ugly bug ball' where we have danced, wriggled, fluttered and buzzed to the beat of the music, shared yummy treats, crafted and generally tired ourselves out. Who knew minibeast balls could be so tiring!

In our Mathematical Development we have continued to explore numerical patterns with odds and even numbers. To help us understand the concept of even numbers we explored the importance of equal numbers for fairness where we drew upon our previous knowledge of doubling and halving. Then we explored that some groups of items cannot be shared equally into two groups and that an odd item remained. Using our knowledge of halving we understood that if a number could half it was called an even number and if it couldn't be halved it was an odd number.

In our Expressive Arts and Design Development we enjoyed some singing, starting off by warming up our voices. We did this by pretending we had a chewy sweet that we could stretch up and down, we made our our voices go high and low with the action of pulling the 'sweet'

Once we had warmed our voices up, we sang a song 'Barney Bear is walking to the park' we joined in with the actions and each time came up with a different way for teddy to get to the park, this including jogging, hopping, crawling and running.

In our Personal, Social and Emotional Development we learnt that making mistakes is normal and helps us to learn. First we reminded ourselves of our Boris story, in particular the part where Boris tries to make a cake for the children but ends up making a rather big mess in the kitchen! We spoke about how Boris then thinks that this means the children won't want him anymore and he goes back to the scrapyard.

We spoke to our talking partner about what we thought Boris could have done, we decided that he could have said sorry to the children and asked them to help him to tidy up.
Finally we talked about a mistake we have made and what we did to put it right, we spoke about how we learnt from the mistakes that we made and hopefully it will help us to not make the same mistake again.

Boris says "Making mistakes helps us to grow"
Bible link 'If they fall, they will not stay down, because the Lord will help them up.' Psalm 37:24

In our Physical development we have started practicing for our sports day! Warming up first, we made shapes of different mini beasts: spiders, ants, dragonflies, centipedes and flies. Next we played Spiders and Flies, there were 5 spiders who had to catch the rest of us, who were flies. If we were caught by a spider we had to stand still like we were caught in a spiders web, if another fly ran past us they could free us from the web.

For our sports day practice we focused on relay races, we learnt that a relay race means that we work as a team and run one at a time. For our first race we had to run around the cone and back, when we got back our next team member could go, the first team with all their members back and sat down were the winners. In the next races we had to pick up some bean bags before carrying on to the cone at the end. We had lots of fun and were very tired at the end!

In our Communication and Language Development and our Understanding of the World Development, we explored new vocabulary in our class story book 'Caterpillar Butterfly' by Vivian French. We have really enjoyed this story so far as we have discovered that the Peacock butterfly likes to lay its eggs on the underside of nettles.

Did you know caterpillars can be fussy eaters?
We have discovered that cabbage white caterpillars will only eat cabbages and peacock, red admirals and small tortoiseshell caterpillars like nettles best. Once the caterpillars have grown they are ready to pupate and they find themselves a stick or tree to attach itself to, to make a pupa. We have really enjoyed learning all the scientific names for the stages of the butterfly's lifecycle.

In our Literacy Development we explored the difference between fiction and non-fiction books. We understand that non-fiction means it is real or factual. Sharing a factual book about ladybirds we began to compile a list of facts that we knew and shared them in our quick write tasks.
In our daily phonics sessions, we have continued to consolidate our set 2 sounds and revisited 'ow' long 'oo' and short 'oo' special friend sounds. We are particularly proud of how we can quickly read polysyllabic words now as we understand how to use of units of breath. What superstars we are!

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