The excitement has been starting to build in Reception this week as we have begun our Christmas show rehearsals in earnest!  The show itself will take place on Tuesday 6th December at 2pm and then again on Wednesday 7th December at 9.30am.  Year 1, year 2 and nursery children are also involved in the performance and, therefore, parents and carers are invited to attend one performance only so as to ensure everyone can actually fit in the hall!  In our case, Reception parents are invited to attend the Wednesday morning performance.

Although we have been very busy with our rehearsals, we also found time to practise the sounds we have learnt so far and to learn three new ones.  First, we pulled ‘r’ out of the sound bag.  The action for ‘r’ is to pretend to be an animal playing and growling.  This can be a bit tricky, as it is easy to let the sound become a ‘grrr’ from the throat, rather than a ‘rrrrr’ from the front of the mouth.  Try practising both to see the difference!

Next, we pulled ‘h’ out of the sound bag.  We imagined we had been running around the oak tree in our playground ten times before we had to stop, huffing and puffing because we were out of breath!  The action for ‘h’ is to put your hand in front of your mouth and feel the puffs of air as you say ‘h’, ‘h’, ‘h’ and pretend to catch your breath.

The third sound to come out of the sound bag this week was ‘b’.  We all pretended to bounce a ball to help us learn and remember this sound.  Please note, the jolly phonics action for ‘b’ is to pretend to hit a ball with a bat, which is pretty similar to our bouncing ball action.  We decided to use a bounce instead of a bat and ball to keep our action smaller, and therefore a bit safer for each other, when sitting altogether on the carpet!

We also learnt two new tricky words this week; ‘no’ and ‘into’.  We have now learnt all of the phase 2 tricky words and we will move onto the phase 3 ones next week.  Please look out for a tricky word pot in your book bag over the coming week or so.

Finally, it has also been a busy week in the castle of course! The resident princesses have been getting ready for their next banquet while the brave knights have been protecting the castle from all manner of scary beasts!

And here you can see the workers were not afraid to get their hands dirty when painting the drawbridge!

The dressing-up clothes have been a huge hit with the children since the start of the year, and several of them can often be found pretend-playing as knights, kings and queens. So, when it came to deciding what our new role-play area should be, the obvious choice was a medieval castle complete with banquet hall and open fire!  The children have been busy putting their castle together; carefully sponge painting the stone walls, upholstering the thrones with shiny, gold material and sticking material together to create tapestries which are hanging on either side of the roaring fire.  We have just finished painting the drawbridge which we will add next week.  Here’s what our castle looks like so far!

While medieval castles would have had narrow, rectangular shaped windows, our castle is a little bit different.  What do you notice about the shapes of the windows?

We have been thinking about all the different people who would have lived in a castle which is helping us to develop our understanding of community (one of the themes within our current ‘Who am I’? topic).

We have also been busy pulling three new sounds out of the sound bag and learning two new tricky words (‘I’ and ‘the’).  The first sound was ‘ck’ which, as you can see, is actually two letters.  Even though this sound is made up of two letters, it only makes one sound, not two.  We call these types of sounds digraphs or holding hands sounds and we link our thumbs together, as if holding hands, when we see them.

The sound that ‘ck’ makes is exactly the same as the sounds ‘c’ and ‘k’ that we learnt last week.  The action (pretending to play castanets) is also the same.

Weekend challenge: can you read the word duck, using your robot arms?  Can you think of any other ‘ck’ words? Can you write them?

Next, we pulled the sound ‘e’ out of the bag.  We imagined that we were mixing up the ingredients to make a cake and carefully broke an egg into the bowl saying ‘e, e, e’.

It is very easy to muddle up the vowel sounds, especially e and i.  Try to remember e is for e-lephant, while i is for i-gloo.

The final sound of the week was ‘u’.  We have had quite a bit of rain this week, so it was easy to imagine that we would need our umbrellas to keep us dry.

Many thanks to everyone who came along to the parent evening meetings this week.  We hope you found your meeting useful and enjoyed getting an idea of what your child gets up to during the school day!

This week, we have continued to think carefully about the properties of 2D shapes and we have been looking for shapes in the world around us.

Weekend challenge: how many circles, triangles, squares and rectangles can you find at home?  Can you find any other 2D shapes?

The first sound in our sound bag this week was ‘o’.  When saying the sound, we made sure we were making the ‘o’ letter shape with our mouths and used our pointy finger to draw the ‘o’ shape around our mouths.  (Please note, there is a jolly phonics action for ‘o’ where the children pretend to turn a light switch on and off – the children didn’t learn this one as we felt reinforcing the letter shape was more important at this point but if you are using any jolly phonics resources at home please feel free to use both actions).

The next two sounds to come out of the bag were ‘c’ (curly ‘c’) and ‘k’ (kicking ‘k’), which have exactly the same sound and the same action.  We pretended we were Spanish dancers playing our casatanets as we said ‘c, c, c, c, c’ and ‘k, k, k, k, k’.

This week, we also introduced the idea of tricky words.  These are words that cannot be sounded out as they just don’t make sense when you try to do so.  For example, the tricky word ‘to’ sounds like ‘toh’ if you sound out the sounds ‘t’ and ‘o’and blend them together. So, instead of sounding out, tricky words need to be learnt on-sight as whole words.

Within phase 2 of the letters and sounds programme, there are five tricky words to learn ‘no, go, I, to, the’.

This week, we learnt the tricky words ‘go’ and ‘to‘. We said ‘hey, you’re a tricky word!  You can’t trick me!’ These tricky words were lurking all around the classroom, so we searched high and low to find them and feed them to Sharkey the Shark who thinks tricky words are delicious!  

Lots of words can be sounded out and it is really important at this stage that the children understand the difference.  Here are some words that can be sounded out and use all the sounds we have learnt so far.

sat, pat, tap, sap, as

it, is, sit, sat, pit, tip, pip, sip

an, in, nip, pan, pin, tin, tan, nap

am, man, mam, mat, map, Pam, Tim, Sam

dad, and, sad, dim, dip, din, did, Sid

tag, gag, gig, gap, nag, sag, gas, pig, dig

got, on, not, pot, top, dog, pop, God, Mog

can, cot, cop, cap, cat, cod

kid, kit, Kim, Ken

Weekend challenge: How many of these words can you read? Don’t forget to use your robot arms!

Welcome back everyone, we hope you all had a fun and restful half term break!

In Reception, we have jumped straight back into lots of very busy playing, exploring and learning.  We have been putting together a new role-play area (more details to follow…) and we have been learning the names and properties (e.g. number of sides and corners) of 2D shapes (i.e. circles, triangles, rectangles and squares).

This week, we have also been taking some time to think about what it means to be a good friend.  We read the story of the beautiful Rainbow Fish who learns how to make friends by sharing his shimmery scales and the story of George and Nepo (Kings of the Castle) who work out how to become friends even though they don’t speak the same language. These are both particularly lovely books if you have a chance to re-read them at home.

We also pulled three new sounds out of the sound bag.

First came ‘m’ and we used our imaginations to think about a delicious chocolate cupcake with ice-cream, chocolate sauce and sprinkles on top!  We all said ‘mmmmmm’ as we rubbed our tummies.  What is your favourite food? What makes you say ‘mmmmmm’!

Next came the sound ‘d’ and we all used our drumsticks to play our imaginary drums – d, d, d, d, d, d, d.

Finally, we read the story of Inky Mouse who puts the plug in the sink, fills it up with water and carefully washes his ears and whiskers.  When he’s nice and clean, he pulls the plug out of the sink and listens carefully as the water swirls down the plughole – g, g, g, g, g.

We have been working really hard this week to make sure we are saying the sounds correctly and not ‘dropping our lower jaw’ especially when we say sounds like ‘n’ (remember it’s not ‘nuh’) and ‘t’ (it’s not ‘tuh’).

Keep practising everyone!