What a lot of learning and play!
Despite the cold weather, sniffles and general tiredness that comes with this time of year, the children have tried hard to remain focused on their learning and make some really good progress.
Many children are now confident with many of the ‘special friends’ (digraphs) that we have been learning in phonics and we are delighted that some children are now choosing to write independently during their play, such as labels on their drawings and maps, lists of words or notes for family. Please continue to encourage any independent writing at home, whether it’s labels on drawings or objects, shopping lists, writing words or a diary in their own notebook (for example, I went to the shop). Anything like this will really help to improve their confidence when writing independently during our Big Writing sessions as well as during their play.
The children have continued to show great enthusiasm for maths this half term, focusing on numbers 5 and 6, shapes and measures. Again, any practise at home would add to their confidence in these areas.
We spent last week learning all about the Lunar New Year celebrations and how it is celebrated around the world, including China. They have found out facts about why and how Lunar New Year is celebrated and enjoyed listening to The Great Race, the story about how the years were named after 12 animals. Highlights of the week were the stir fry tasting and dragon dancing in PE! This week they have loved playing imaginatively with our small world set up of the story and getting creative making patterned snakes.
This week it has been Children’s Mental Health Week and the children have thought really carefully about this year’s theme – Knowing yourself, Growing yourself. All children were able to talk about their feelings, explaining what makes them happy and sad. We also celebrated our similarities and differences, being proud and telling everyone something that we are good at but also recognising that we find other things more challenging.
During our topic learning, we have started to answer the question Where is our school? by using maps and atlases to learn about the countries of the UK, where Collingham is located and the differences between villages, towns and cities. The children loved this geography-based learning and this will continue into next half term.
Finally, we all enjoyed celebrating the NSPCC Number Day today. The children all looked fantastic and we had a special maths lesson where we focused on playing number games – a Numbots version of Build A Beetle and another classic, Snakes and Ladders. We had lots of fun as well as learning!
The Reception Team 😊
Winter is whizzing by!
How can we have been back for 3 weeks already! The time is absolutely whizzing by in school, perhaps because we’ve been so busy!
Last week, our focus story was Noah’s Ark from the Bible. The children have listened to and discussed the version in our children’s Bible, focusing on important and perhaps new language such as Ark, dove and promise. We have also read lots of other versions of the story and the children have enjoyed playing with Noah’s Ark small world toys and counting animals in twos. The children have also been thinking about a new year promise that they could make such as tidying their playroom or going to sleep on their own.
This week, we have begun our main topic for this term – Frozen! The children started by exploring what winter is like in our school grounds here in Collingham, then used visual prompts to begin to think of questions about winter and the polar regions that they might like to find answers to during this topic. Yesterday we discussed hibernation and migration and will continue to recap these concepts next week. We had great fun making bird feeders which we hope will attract lots of birds to your garden this weekend. Don’t forget to do some bird spotting or counting and tell us about what you’ve done for homework!
In Maths, the children have continued to consolidate their learning about number 5, working out all the ways that 5 is composed (2 + 3, 4 + 1 etc) and with some children recording their findings on part-part-whole models or number sentences. We have also continued learning about 2D (flat) shapes, hunting for them around the classroom and investigating what happens when you combine shapes and finding shapes within shapes. Great for their problem-solving skills! Perhaps ask them to find these shapes at home too and watch Numberblocks Flatland. They have tried heard to learn the following shapes: circle, triangle, square, rectangle, kite, dart and even rhombus, trapezium, pentagon and, our favourite, parallelogram!
Have a lovely weekend and happy bird spotting!
The Reception Team 😊