Reception w/b 31st October
Date: 4th Nov 2022 @ 5:38pm
What a pleasure it has been to welcome the children back to school to begin the second half of the term. They have settled back into the rhythm of the school day beautifully and myself, Mrs North and Miss Toft have all noticed superb progress since the beginning of the year; children are settling to complete activities beautifully and are working very hard. Well done Reception!
You may notice a couple of changes to the timetable for this half term. The timetable is likely to adapt each half term to ensure that it grows with the children to meet their needs – we progress so quickly in Reception! We have introduced ‘Dough Disco’ as our morning starter activity. This is wonderful for developing hand strength and fine motor skills as well as being lots of fun! We are also now only going into whole school worship on a Friday for a celebration assembly. On the other days, we will complete worship in class through stories, drama and practical activities to help us to understand the same concepts. This allows us to complete phonics immediately after registration in some smaller groups with staff from across EYFS and Key Stage 1. This is a fantastic opportunity and allows us to tailor our phonics teaching even more closely to individual needs. We will be in groups of between 4 and 8 children, which means that the children benefit from even more support. Even after just a week, we can already see the benefits of this approach and the children have loved working with new adults in new spaces! In addition to myself and Miss Toft, children will be working with: Miss Shea (Year 1 teaching assistant), Mrs Sherliker Hewitt (Year 1 teaching assistant), Mrs Oldham (Year 2 teaching assistant) and Mrs Warren (Year 2 teaching assistant). This means that each group may be working on different sounds each week. I shall therefore update you with the sounds of the week via Dojo, allowing me to send individual messages.
This week, we launched our new topic – superheroes! Please see our topic web for more information. After identifying what the children already knew about superheroes, we were introduced to our new text – Juniper Jupiter by Lizzy Stewart. We read some of the book on Monday and then made a prediction (a clever guess) about what may happen next in the story. Miss Witham then made us wait a whole day to find out! The next day, we read the whole story (phew!) before introducing our story map. We have spent the rest of the week learning the new story map. We learnt the Talk For Writing actions for ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’, ‘unfortunately’ and ‘then’ before working together to think of the rest of the actions. We have continued to practise the story map to help to embed the story. This will help us to complete some related activities next week, such as creating a list of questions, hot seating, defining tricky vocabulary from the text and innovating to create our own story. We can’t wait!
In maths we have particularly focused on recognising the Numicon shapes as we ordered them, identified them without looking at them in a ‘feely bag’ and then arranged them to fill the base boards and the buildings in our ‘Numicon City’ tuff tray. Using the Numicon scheme alongside NCETM Mastering Number will help to ensure a real depth of mathematical understanding.
On Monday afternoon, we were learning all about Diwali. We were particularly interested in rangoli patterns and diya lamps, as reflected in the activities completed in provision time. We read ‘Dipal’s Diwali’ and enjoyed watching some CBeebies videos:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/lets-celebrate-diwali
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/my-first-festivals-diwali
In our provision this week, we have enjoyed: making Rangoli patterns using 2D shapes and with Numicon, completing Diwali colour by numbers sheets, making Diwali lanterns and using play dough to making diya lamps. This continued into Forest School where we used clay to make diya lamps and natural resources to create Rangoli patterns.
On Tuesday afternoon, we enjoyed this half term’s ‘No Outsiders’ lesson. Our book was ‘Red Rockets and Rainbow Jelly’. This helped us to agree that our friends can like different things to us but we can still be friends, just like Nick and Sue.
On Wednesday, we had a rather exciting RE session. We introduced the Nativity story to the children as we found out about the birth of the son of God. What a precious gift! After reading the story, we used a knitted Nativity set to retell it. Now that we know the story, we have been able to introduce the first two songs for our Nativity. You may hear lots of ‘Such a Long Way’ and ‘Mary, Mary What a Surprise’ over the weekend!
On Thursday, Mrs Edwards had planned lots of exciting activities for us to learn all about Bonfire Night. This helped us to feel excited about Thursday’s wonderful fireworks at school.
As a result of the fireworks, we anticipated lots of tired children today! We therefore decided to have a beautifully calm PE session with some Cosmic Kids yoga – with a superhero theme! This was great fun and we were impressed with the balance and flexibility shown by the children.
Today, we have also worked as a class to write our own nonsense poem inspired by ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’ by Spike Milligan. We love listening to this poem so this was a great choice to inspire our poetry. We were so impressed with the creative ideas and ability to rhyme words. Some children then helped me to publish and illustrate our poem. What super authors and illustrators we have in Reception! Here is our poem:
On the Clip Clap Clop
On the Clip Clap Clop
Where the pigs go plop
and the chickens all say clang
There’s a Clop Clap Clip
Where the frogs go blip
and the frying pans bing, bong and bang.
On the Clip Clop Clap
All the tigers can tap
and you just can’t catch ‘em when they do.
So it’s Clip Clap Clop
Pigs go plop
Clop Clap Clip
Frogs go blip
Clip Clop Clap
Tigers can tap
What a noisy place to stop
Is the Clip Clap Clip Clap Clop!
Reception, we are very proud of you all for such a fabulous week. Another week of fun and learning beckons! I hope that you all enjoy and lovely weekend.
With many thanks,
Miss Witham
