This week, all the children at St. Matthew’s thought about how they can keep themselves safe when they are online.  We all learnt a new safety code that we will be using to remind themselves about how to keep safe when we go online to play games or look at videos.

First, the children need to remember to ‘zip it’ – in other words, they shouldn’t tell anyone online their name, their age or where they go to school – just like they wouldn’t tell a stranger in the park these things.  Second, the children need to remember to block it; meaning they shouldn’t click on videos, games or pop-ups they are not sure about.  And finally, the children need to remember to flag it; they should go to a trusted adult (‘flag it up’) if they do see something online that makes them feel worried or uncomfortable.

We have also been busy learning 3 new sounds this week.  They are ‘p’, ‘i’ and ‘n’.  Here are the actions and mouth shapes for these sounds.

Weekend challenge: can you remember the six sounds we have learnt so far? Can you remember the actions? How many different words can you make with the six sounds we know? (e.g. sat, pat, pin…)

In our maths lessons, we have been working hard to recognise numerals and show that we understand the quantities that different numerals represent.

Finally, we have been very busy practising for our Harvest celebration which will take place next Friday.  We have been learning a poem about a little brown seed.  If you have time, please do practise the poem with your child as we are trying to learn the words by heart! (Please note, we say ‘sprinkle’ and ‘twinkle’ twice, not three times).

Thank you!

We continued with our topic work this week by taking another peek inside our bodies.  This time, we had a think about something you can’t actually see, even with an X-ray! It’s something that we often say you will find inside your heart – our feelings.

We read a lovely story all about the different feelings we might have and some of the reasons we might be feeling these things.  The children were so eloquent when it came to expressing their thoughts about their own feelings and many of them shared different situations that have made them feel happy, sad, excited, scared and shy.

Later in the week, we also had a think about how we can tell what a person is feeling in their heart and we all agreed that you can usually tell by looking at someone’s face.  We then read the delightful story of Beegu, an alien who arrives on planet Earth in search of friendship.  Throughout the story, Beegu finds herself in some situations that make her feel sad and others that make her feel happy.  The children looked very carefully at the illustrations in the story and realised that whenever Beegu had her ears up, she was feeling happy inside.  Whenever she felt sad, she had her ears down.

One of the prime areas of the Early Years Curriculum is called Managing Feelings and Behaviour and as part of this area, the children are expected to be able to “talk about how they and others show feelings”.

Weekend challenge: Have a look at the photos below.  How do you think the child is feeling inside? Why do you think they might be feeling like this?  Have you ever felt like this?  What happened to make you feel like this?

We also continued with our phonics lessons this week; learning two new sounds ‘a‘ and ‘t‘.  When saying ‘a’, remember to open your mouth wide, as if eating an apple (this is also the action that we learnt for ‘a’).  When saying ‘t’, remember it is a very quiet sound – it is not ‘tuh’ so be careful you don’t drop your jaw too far when saying this one!

As we had already learnt the sound ‘s’ last week, we now knew three sounds ‘s’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ and we were ready to start making words!  We had a go at making the words ‘at’ and ‘sat’.  The first thing we needed to do was pull these words apart to listen for the individual sounds – so Miss Cronin sound-walked the words while the children counted the sounds on their fingers.  We then chose the correct graphemes (letters – in printed form) in the correct order starting with the first sound, then the middle sound and finally the last sound.  The last step was to squeeze the sounds back together again to make the word we needed!  Well done Reception!

In our maths lessons, we spent lots of time thinking about the names and properties of 2D shapes, including a heart!  We talked about the number of sides and corners that a circle, a triangle, a square and a rectangle have.  We also talked about shapes that have curvy sides and shapes that have straight sides.

Weekend challenge: Can you think of a shape that has 1 curvy side and 1 flat side? Can you find some different 2D shapes in your house?

Finally, we have been continuing to enjoy singing our number songs together.  Here’s another one for you to try singing to together at home (please note, we have been singing ‘knock on the door’ instead of ‘open the door’ – but this version is the closest I could find to the one we use – enjoy!):