The last week of your little ones’ first term at school ! Well done – you’ve all been brilliant. The children have settled, got to know each other, been learning how to manage their feelings, worked hard and played hard.

Our fairy story of the week was Hansel and Gretal… the children made pathways in various guises – sparkly water poured through amazing marble run constructions and stepping stone pathways back to Hansel and Gretal’s little cottage. The children have really enjoyed our fairy tales and understand that each has good and bad characters and that ultimately the good characters live …’happily ever after.’

Our number work has seen us pretend the gym mat trolley was a bus. We’ve counted the people on and off the bus – added 1 more passenger, a passenger has got off to make it one less and travelled far and wide on our bus from Wimbledon and Kingston all the way to the beach and South Africa. The children all enjoyed waiting at the various ‘stops’ and counting the children on and off the bus.  We’ve also consolidated our sorting focus – looking at groups of shapes, numbers and colour – mixing them up and re- grouping all of them by colour,  number or shape.

We have used numicon which are plastic pieces that represent numbers ( see the photo below) – they have the same amount of holes as the number they represent. The are colour coded too. The children learn numbers quickly using the numicon as its such a visual tool. This week we used it to add beads or seeds into each hole with tweezers mixing some fine motor work with numbers.

As usual our writing table was busy all week with Christmas card writing. We also wrote Christmas lists … Father Christmas’ sleigh needs to be big this year!

More maths combined some matching  skills and  fine motor skill s pairing socks! This helpful skill might come in handy when you are doing the washing! It’s really not easy for little ones but they all had a go. Our class member who persevered the most at this was Nate ! Well done Nate!

Our daily reading and writing has been complimented by some word puzzles and a fill in the missing sound activity. This is a great way to understand how the children are segmenting and remembering their sounds.

Thank you to Mio for her amazing number of the week – Number 8. A really fun and interactive Number Bag!

Of course we hadn’t forgotten it was the week before Christmas – our production lines have been in full swing making Christmas cards, tree decorations and snow globes,  which all the children have all worked really hard on.

Thank you for all of your very generous contributions to the Christmas party. The children looked fabulous and had a super time playing musical statues, the hokey cokey, musical islands and so on.

Mrs Mooney, Mrs Rainey and I have had a lovely term getting to know your children and are overwhelmed with the number of gifts you have dropped off at school! Thank you so much for all your support this term and your very generous gifts. We are looking forward to opening them and no doubt eating, drinking and smelling them! Thank you all very much indeed.

Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful ( and exciting) New Year.

Despite the title of this weeks blog, we have  focused on The Ugly Duckling!  Our activities included ‘ Hook a Duck ‘ recording  the duck numbers and small world play to re-tell The Ugly Duckling story. This story evoked some strong emotions in the children during circle time, they all felt sad for the ugly duckling and tried to think of ways to help or make him feel better.

At last we found time to finish off our gingerbread men – mixing, stirring, kneading, wrapping, rolling, cutting, baking and decorating… Oh and not forgetting eating – all in a days work for Reception!

We borrowed the super duper oven in the school kitchen to bake our gingerbread… and luckily none of our 30 gingerbread men ran away!

All the children then decorated their own gingerbread man with raisins.

And last but not least all got to enjoy our very own gingerbread man at snack time!

This week we have been learning the days of the week. We have learnt a song to help us remember them, read the days of the week and ordered them in our challenge books. I’ve been asking the children questions such as what is the day:  today/ tomorrow/ yesterday?  Thinking about the end of the week – the ‘ weekend’ and what different things we do on Saturday and Sunday to the rest of the week. The children often refer to a day as: ‘ oh it’s swimming day today’ or ‘ the roast dinner day’ – do name the day they are referring to for them,  to aid their understanding of time and sequencing.

Other activities have included timed number activities :

more pattern making …

The outdoor stage with it’s snowman backdrop has caused a surge of would be  West End stars to come up, choose an instrument and sing all of our Christmas show tunes!

As term is coming to an end the class PE skills have developed considerably with excellent listening, understanding, hand/ eye coordination, controlled gross motor skills and a growing ability to play in teams.

Christmas card writing – this has been fabulous with the children choosing to write hundreds of recycled Christmas cards to friends and family. The cards have really inspired everybody to get writing!

All this Christmas card writing has gone hand-in hand with our new Post Office role play area. The children have helped decide what we need in our role play and described many of the roles that can be played out in a post office! They are writing letters and cards, buying stamps, posting their letters, collecting, sorting and delivering them!

I forgot to send the tricky words sheets home on Friday – many apologies – they will come home on Monday. Here’s a copy if you are keen! Some of them duplicate what you already have in the pot but there are some new words. Please take a look at them over Christmas – play snap, a memory game or matching game.

Our Rapunzel towers are up and looking good as a back drop to our class Christmas tree .

We have our class Christmas party on Wednesday and school breaks up for Christmas on Friday at 2pm!

Wow what a week in Reception Oak Class! Our star studded snow- people put in 3 brilliant performances on Monday for the school and Tuesday and Wednesday for parents. We were very proud of how well our little ones handled sitting so smartly waiting for their turn and joining in all the songs. There were lots of words and actions to remember. Our little ‘ snow piece’ went off well, thank you to all who provided the FABULOUS costumes and came along to support our snow- people! We couldn’t have done it without you.

With much of the week taken up with the Christmas show in the hall, the children enjoyed getting back to some familiar territory with activities in the classroom. Our fairy tales continue with The Gingerbread Man, The Elves and the Shoemaker and some adapted tales which made the children laugh.

Our classroom activities followed on from our stories : Everyone enjoyed using the playdough to decorate the gingerbread men for our fine motor work.

In our number work we were rescuing elves from deep water and checking the amount we had rescued, then recording our findings on the clipboard…

More fine motor work and shape recognition carefully cutting out the shapes to use to match to the shapes shown on the gingerbread people. The children are very good at shape work – we are extending the depth of their knowledge asking ‘ How do you know?’ questions.

‘Yes the front door is a rectangle, but how do you know this?’  The children need to be able to explain : ‘ ..because it’s got 4 sides and I  know it’s not a square because the sides on squares are the same length, rectangles have two long and two short sides.’  Number and maths work at school is very much geared to not just how much you know but how or why you know it !  The greater depth knowledge enables the children to be really confident  with their numbers or shapes enabling them to use them in a range of contexts. Do quiz your children every now and then!

Our literacy work is still very much immersed in understanding story: predominantly how stories are made up. We are concentrating on various elements: Fairy tales all begin with : Once upon a time.. and end with happily ever after. The beginning, middle and end of story – introducing characters, a problem and a solution. The children are really enjoying re-telling stories they know well and making their own story maps, boards and identifying the various story elements –  the characters/ the problem/ the solution and so on.

In this activity the children had to work together trying to find out the missing parts of the story – they really enjoyed this activity and many of them finished the activity and then headed straight over to the writing tale to  make more cards for the missing parts of the story. Fantastic independent learning.

Storyboards for The Gingerbread Man

With all this story writing we mustn’t forget our sounds and reading work : The children have been re-capping phase 2 sounds in various guises and learning more and more tricky words … I will give out some more tricky words for the pots before Christmas (Happy Christmas!!!)  – I hope the children are having a look at them from time to time and playing snap or a memory game with them.

As a tenuous link from The Elves and the Shoemaker we have all been learning how to tie our laces this week… this is easier said than done. We’ve all had lots of go’s with varying degrees of success! On a similar note, we are encouraging all the children to be able to do their coats up independently. The added element of gloves and hats in recent weeks has added a good 5 minutes onto each end of each playtime and it would be great if the children could do their own coats up.:-)

Our Rapunzel towers have been fun to make with the children carefully drawing bricks all around their towers before cutting and sticking what they needed to make Rapunzel and her hair!

Creativity has continued with the start of gingerbread men making! Due to not quite enough time last week, this will continue into next week. The children are measuring, mixing, stirring, kneading, rolling and cutting. Look out for the results in the next weeks blog!

We were treated to a performance of Japanese music lead by Hiromi and Anna’s mummy this week. We saw and heard a Japanese flute, a Japanese guitar and heard a variety of Japanese music styles. It was fantastic. A huge thank you to the Japanese families in our school who provided us with this lovely treat.

Of course it was the start of advent – we have an advent calendar at school – a different child is chosen each day to find the right numbered pocket. We have a beautiful advent candle that we are burning during story time each day and the children were so knowledgeable explaining:   ‘ Advent is when you are waiting for Christmas’ ‘ It’s 25 days and that day is Christmas.’ ‘ Advent is when everybody gets ready for Christmas – writes their cards, puts up a tree and decorations and writes a letter to Father Christmas.  They all had a really good understanding of what advent represented.

Our weekly number bag is still proving a popular part of the week!

Exhausted after the end of 3 performances – this was the best we could do picture wise of our snow class!! Have a good week!