Book Week at St Matthew’s has been very busy. Our Reception,  Oak Class,  have enjoyed an assembly getting us ready for Book Week. This year our focus has been poetry and Miss Leutchford introduced the whole school to a poem called The Magic Box by Kit Wright. Our imaginations were sparked and each class wrote a new stanza for the poem!

The whole school also enjoyed a mix – up day. This entailed all the children working in house teams rather than their class. Spencer ( green). Churchill (blue), Wilberforce(red) and Cecil ( yellow ). The children enjoyed 4 different activities: a singing workshop, a sports and games session, an arts and crafts hour, they made banners to decorate the hall, entered a bookmark competition to win a signed book from our visiting poet and used plasticine to create a Jabberwocky from Lewis Carroll’s poem The Jabberwocky. The children coped incredibly well with our mix-up day, working with all the older children and even having break and lunchimes in different playgrounds.

A highlight for Oak Class came when we had the opportunity to take part in a dance workshop based around Lewis Caroll’s poem The Jabberwocky. All the children enjoyed imagining and moving just like a Jabberwocky – it was quite scary!

The visit from poet Stewart Henderson was a lovely way to round off the week. He asked the children where they were going to spend half term… from the answers he received, he wrote this poem:

Germany, Scotland, Leicester,

Cornwall, Devon, France,

Getting up quite early,

Wearing my best pants,  

Czech Republic secret,

Swimming in the sea, 

Words that tell a story, 

Of us, of you, of me. 

As book week rumbled on throughout the week, Oak Class threw themselves into reading, writing and number. Everyone drew a story map of our story ‘ The Little Red Hen’ and some children had a go at writing the story! Reading here there and everywhere has continued, along with taking a look at subtracting!

We had so much fun making bread for our ‘Little Red Hen’ . It was a messy business that ended with a tasty treat! Well done to the Oak Class Bakers!

After mesauring out our ingredients,we mixed and kneaded our dough. Mrs Bibby took our bread to the school kitchen to bake in the huge oven.

We all tucked into our loaves – with so much bread on offer one member of Oak Class even initiated a taste test!

In other news … this weeks number bag was the best yet with number 4 being subitised in 11 different ways! Learning our sounds, free writing, The Big Question, RE, PE, music and all the other great things that happen in Reception carried on too.

Have a happy half term everybody!

Hello Oak Class Parents!

Another busy week in Reception Oak Class. We have moved from pastoral farming to arable with the children selling fruit and vegetables in their class Farm Shop and counting crops. Our Farm Shop has been a big success with the children, but not so much with the school cleaners … straw everywhere!!

Our hand print chicks have finally dried and are in pride of place on display.

In maths we have done lots of activities around ‘more’ ‘less’ and ‘fewer. 

We have been learning how to play Mancala an ancient Ethiopian game dating back to between 500 and 700 AD. The word mancala is derived from the Arabic word naqala, which means “to move.” It’s a simple game that concentrates on turn taking and counting, however the more you play,  the more tactics become apparant, making it a good fun game for all family generations to play. Highly recommended!

More maths has been hidden in our vegetable patch with the children grouping the crops and counting how many of each crop we have grown.

Revising ordering and counting in twos with our 10 green bottles…

Our writing has been going from strength to strength with the children enjoying writing about what they imagined might be inside the two eggs that sat side by side on the sand in Alexis Deacon’s wonderful story : Croc and Bird. Our imaginations ran wild with suggestions from dinosaurs to duck billed platypus’ and penguins. On reading the story we found out , of course,  that the two eggs encased a crocodile and bird. Well worth a read.

On a Friday, instead of the directed writing tasks that take place on Monday to Thursday, we have ‘ Free Writing Friday’. This involves a picture stimulus that might be taken from our story, our BIG Question or something else we have enjoyed during the week. The children then ‘ free write’;  which is writing without adult support,  tricky word walls or sound mats! This is obviously the ultimate goal and we are slowly but surely getting there. Two class members have taken their free writing to another level and over 3 days this week, written and illustrated their first book!

Our new reading pairs have been well received. Everybody decorated a lolly stick which the childen use to point to the words as they read. The children read their books with a partner and help each other with sounding out words when they get stuck. Along with group reading, one to one reading, perceptual reading ( where we hear, and then all read a text together as a class) and home reading, the children should all be making great strides!

Our weekly trip to the ICT suite is a highlight for the children. They are getting more adventurous as they click away!

Next week is BOOK WEEK at St Matthew’s and we have an exciting week instore for the children of Oak Class.

Check back next week to see what we got up to!

We’ve had a fantastic week immersing ourselves in all things chickens. Everybody enjoyed holding our fluffy offspring. Big smiles all round and kind, gentle hands.

Our chicks have been at the centre of our work with us learning about how we care for them. The children have helped to replenish their chick crumb and water everyday and Mrs Mooney and I have been in charge of the cleaning of the brood hutch! The children have written a list of these important jobs when caring for chicks or other animals.

Another key piece of writing this week centred around the life cycle of a hen. From the hen laying an egg, incubating for 21 days, the chick hatching and growing into a hen or cockerel. The children used prepositions to describe the order of events in the life cycle.

We have also had a class vote on names for our chicks! We began by everyone writing a list of ten names they thought would suit our 8 female and two male chicks. From this large database of names we narrowed it down and took a class vote. We displayed the results of our voting on a bar chart.

Creative juices have been flowing courtesy of our chicks with everybody producing a beautiful pencil sketch of a chick. The children really got into the idea of drawing carefully and adding the detail they could see. They sat quietly, one pair at a time, with a clipboard and pencil and took time with their sketches. They are really rather good!

Further chicks have been created through hand printing chicks, cut and stick chicks and chick collages.

The children are enjoying their PE lessons on the field ( thank you to everyone for providing plimsoles/trainers) and thankfully even seem keen to get changed these days!

Mrs Rainey takes the children for one session a week and is teaching music:  naming instruments, recognising the sounds of various instruments and of course playing instruments! She will move on to rhythm, tempo and pitch as the term proceeds.

Each week the children have a Religious Education session. We  follow plans provided by the Southwark Diocesian Board. Our current theme is : What Makes People Special ? and this week we read and discussed The Parable of the Lost Sheep. The children also take part in a weekly discussion named ‘THE BIG QUESTION’. This is a topical question that we present at the children’s level to enable them to access and have a point of view to put forward. Lately the questions have included ‘ Should you repair damage, or demolish and rebuild ? ‘ (This was in response to the fire at Notre Dame.) Many of the children likened this idea to building with lego – it’s often taken some time and they are always proud of their efforts, occasionally a lego work of art will be knocked and a key feature will be broken. All the children did an excelllent job justifying their reasons to either mend or start again!

Other questions this term have included:

‘Is it ever okay to copy?’

‘ Should we aways give people a second chance?’

The questions are in response to a news item from that week and the children always have interesting takes on these questions and good reasons for their opinions.

Our weekly visit to the ICT room is also proving popular with the children learning the names of the parts of the computer and their uses, along with how to hold the mouse, which side of the mouse to click,  ( Stick a piece of blutak on the left hand side of your mouse, if the children ever use a home computer – it really helps them!) and how to log on at school. They then  have a go at a math’s game that matches our weekly focus.

We learn, revise and practice our sounds and tricky words every day through various games, whiteboard work and fun songs and phonic games via our smart board.  All the children are in a reading group and we practice reading different types of text – fiction, non-fiction, lists, signs and so on everyday.

Reading is the most important thing you can do at home to enable your child to become a great writer, reader, have access to a wide range of vocabulary and an understanding of the world. The following impact poster sums up the statistical benefits of a daily dose of reading. Twenty minutes in one go is too much for a four and five year old but the notion is the same. Read, read and read some more. Any reading is great reading, my 4 year old son has no interest in the books he has to bring bring home from school but has taken to reading our lawn mower manual … at least it’s something! As long as your child will allow you, please read to them or with them every day.

I’m sending a tricky word wall sheet home next week, purely for the children to show you and hopefully have a go at reading or using some of the words in their writing.

Thanks for all your support – Mrs Mooney and I are very grateful that you allow us the priviledge of spending our days with your little ones. They are a source of great fun, interest and wonder!

Hello Parent’s and Carers of Oak Class !

I hope you are enjoying the long weekend. A brief overview of last week in Reception which saw us all still emerged in farm life. A particular highlight being our Muddy Puddle Farm – it was such a job keeping the farm and animals clean!

Our class tractor proved so popular last week that the children decided to make a second tractor. The boys worked hard to make it!

The real highlight of the week came with the arrival of an incubator with 10 chick eggs! We learnt all about hens laying eggs and keeping them warm by sitting on them- incubating them for 21 days. We understood the hens turn the eggs every so often to prevent the embryo ‘sticking’ inside the egg. Unfortunately we couldnt look after the hen too so our eggs arrived in a warm incubator. We kept a careful eye on it at all times! On listenening very carefully we could hear some peeping from inside the eggs! The chicks started their pipping – tapping on the inside of their shell – to tap their way out. We watched each egg gently crack and the chicks hatch.  One was so fast,  by the time we returned from assembly on Friday,  she had hatched!

Once the chicks were dry and fluffy we carefully transferred them to a brood hutch which had a special lamp inside to keep them warm. We now have to keep their brood hutch clean and give them fresh chick crumb and water twice a day.  We have worked hard writing about the lifecycle of a hen and doing some fantastic observational drawing of our chicks along with singing a variety or chicken / egg themed songs!

In number work this week we have counted in twos! We have sung ‘ The animals went in two by two’ and lined up endless farm animals ready to go and climb into Noah’s ark all in twos!

The children were fantasic at counting in two’s and we moved on to counting in 10’s – we built fields using dienes rods ( plastic rods with marked divides of 10 sections therefore each rod equalling 10.) We all made varying size fields with our dienes rods – some square, some rectangle.  We counted in 10’s to find the size of our field. The children went on to fill their fields with cotton wool sheep and see whose field could hold the most sheep.

In reading and writing we have concentrated on ‘ ur’  and ‘ow’ tricky diagraphs – examples being picture, adventure, treasure and cow, crown, town, brown and so on. The children recognised and spotted the sounds and used them in their own writing.

We love a good story in Reception and keep our stories relevant to our topics. A favourite this week has been The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett.

Enjoy this long weekend … the fun and learning continue next week, see you there!