Welcome back Reception class

Welcome back Reception Class, it has been lovely to see you all after the Christmas break. I have enjoyed listening to your exciting Christmas news and all about the different presents you received and activities you completed with your families.

As a class, we are excited to start a new topic of houses and homes and have introduced the story of Hansel and Gretel to lead us in our learning. We are reading the rewritten version by Michael Morpurgo, which has led to some great discussions so far about the characters and elements of the plot.

Like all our new topics, we began with our Big Art project. We have looked at the artist Paul Horton and some of his artwork based on houses. We observed the different ways he uses colour in his painting, some were brightly painted with primary colours, others were muted and used shades of grey that evoked a sense of wartime and some used pastel colours. In our discussions and comparisons of his work, we noticed that he puts a little heart shaped smoke trail from chimneys and understood this was his little message that home is where we feel loved the most with the people that love us the most.

We chose some of our favourite painting and made attempts to draw and paint in a similar style, each contributing to different elements of the picture so it was a real collaborative effort. We think they look lovely, we think you will too!

In provision we have made observational sketches from pictures of different types of houses and homes and also explored some gingerbread houses like in the story of Hansel and Gretel. These we have explored using the medium of pastel crayons, emulating the sweet decorations in bright colours. Our classroom looks a fabulous riot of colours and styles.

In our first Heartsmart session with Boris this term we explored who is special to us.
Boris say, 'We all have someone we can show love to.'
we reread the Boris story to find out who gave love to Boris and how they showed this. this gave us lots of ideas to think about how we show love to others. Using one of our classroom dolls, we imagined who the special person was and how we show love to them. we had lots of thoughtful responses and later on we drew a picture to show this.

This linked to the Bible quote 'Ihave not stopped giving thanks to God for you. I remember you in my prayers. Ephesians 1:16

On Thursday afternoon we enjoyed our Sportscape session with Hayley.

On Friday morning, we were pleased to join our year 6 buddies on the daily mile track for our well-being time. I think the cold crisp morning certainly made us run quicker to keep warm !

Enjoy the weekend Reception Class.
See you Monday.
Mrs Ward