It has been a rather special week in Reception with both the Christmas shows and Christmas party taking place.  A huge thank you to all the parents and carers for giving us so much support by providing costumes, coming along to be our audiences and sending in treats for the party!

Here are some photos from our busy Christmas week:

This week we read the classic story of ‘The Jolly Postman’ about a postman who delivers cards and letters to the characters from several well-known fairy tales.  It is a delightful story made even more enjoyable by the fact that you can actually pull the letters and postcards out of envelopes throughout the story. It is well worth a re-read (and there is also a Christmas version!).  We are now working on writing our own sorts of letters which we will tell you more about next week, so watch this space…

In our phonics lessons, we learnt two new sounds; ‘h’ and ‘b’.  Here are the actions and mouth shapes for these sounds.  

In our maths lessons this week, we have been finding out about the concept of weight (i.e. objects that are “heavier” and “lighter”).  This is not an easy concept to understand and many of the children confuse it with size (i.e. things being “bigger” and “smaller”).  For example, they may hold the misconception that if something is smaller it will be lighter.

To challenge their ideas, we used the bucket scales to weigh two identical plastic boxes.  To our surprise, one of the boxes made the bucket tip down.  After some careful consideration, the children realised that there must be something “heavy” inside this box and, indeed, when we opened it we discovered it was full of coins while the other box contained a single feather!

The children have really been enjoying using the bucket scales to weigh all sorts of things in the classroom.  They have been coming up with their own ideas about what to weigh, making their own predictions (e.g. I think it will be lighter because…), weighing the objects and even recording their findings.  What a lot of budding scientists we have in Reception!

Weekend challenge: look around your home, can you find something that is big but light?  How about something that is small but heavy?  Why do you think these objects are light and/or heavy?

We also have some special visitors in our classroom at the moment!  Despite the cold weather, Miss Cronin managed to find some earthworms in her garden and we decided to make a worm hotel together so that we could take a closer peek at the life of a worm.  In this photo, I had just told the children what we would be making and, as you can see, they were quite taken with the idea!

We followed the instructions in the wormery box very carefully and everyone had a turn (if they wanted to!) to add some soil, sand or a worm to the hotel.  We are all quite convinced that the biggest worm we added is, of course, the real Superworm!

After we had made our worm hotel, we got to work writing lots of signs to let everyone know what it is and that they must not touch it or speak too loudly when they are nearby!

Finally, our Star of the Week did yet another fantastic job of filling his number bag up with all things to do with the number 7.  Here he is presenting his bag to the class:

Our new number of the week has been chosen as number:

Tricky word pots have now started to come home in your child’s book bag.

Please look out for them and use them to support your child’s learning at home.

Here is a copy of the handout (that you’ll find in the book bag) which explains more about the pots and what to do with them: word-pots

Many thanks!