Welcome back after half term – I hope you all enjoyed a well earned break from the morning school routine/stress! We are now officially half way through your little ones first year of school, they have all changed a lot, becoming older and wiser already!

This week we have discussed our half term’ s and in number work concentrated on matching amounts/ numbers and numicon pieces. We also played lots of board games including Snakes and Ladders.

Snakes and Ladders proved a very popular choice with even a queue forming ready to play next! The children were excited to see a familiar game and were articulate in explaining the rules to each other. They used 2 dice and added up their scores, they moved their counter accurately, counting carefully and most children were able to recognise the tens numbers on the board squares. A great fun game if you are ever at a loss of what to do with your little one!

Our Out and About topic has taken us to analysing the weather! We have watched daily BBC weather forecasts – discussed our favourite types of weather and why and begun to make up our own weather forecasts in our class weather station.  The writing table has had many children writing their own forecasts and everyone has come to the weather station to write weather words independently.

Our fine motor skills have been tested trying to thread ‘ raindrops’ from clouds …

The water tray has been transformed using various crates, tubing, drainpipes, sieves and funnels to make pathways for  water to travel through. The children are so inventive and have used the equipment to create some convoluted and jolly impressive pipelines!

Weather and number work combine – the children had to measure mounts of water with the syringes and fill the buckets. They were able to read the calibrated syringes accurately and some able to add up how many millilitres of water they had added!

Construction, in its various guises is always popular. It leads to creativity, sharing equipment along with helping/ advising each other – all good skills to hone for the future.

On Tuesday we were very busy learning about Shrove Tuesday. Using up the provisions in the cupboard, by making pancakes and preparing to give something up for the 40 days of Lent until Easter. The children have all written their own Lenten Promise as well as made pancakes! In small groups we made our chef’s hats, followed by the pancake batter and later on in the day watched our pancakes being cooked before enjoying tucking into them as an afternoon snack!

Our favourite story of the week was: Mr Wolf’s Pancakes by Jan Fearnley. Get your child to tell you about the twist at the end!

On Wednesday Mother Helen, from our school Church St Matthew’s,  came to our assembly and told us all about Ash Wednesday. She explained how Christians believe we came from dust and will return to dust. At the end of the assembly the children could chose to have ashes from last years Palm Sunday crosses be drawn in a cross on their foreheads.

On Friday Reception class had a very special visit from Mr Quinn and his dog Charlie:

The writing area was very busy this week too…

Hope you have all had a good week too. Enjoy the weekend 🙂

Hello! Happy Valentine’s Day!

This week we began with an assembly and workshop on using the internet safely. The children enjoyed an active session finding out some sensible rules to remember if ever using the internet.

Our water tray turned into beautiful pink sand with some glitter too. Hidden in the sand were a variety of heart shaped objects – the children’s  job was to count how many heart shaped objects they could find. After having a go at this they all enjoyed making heart shaped,  pink sand cup cakes!  We learnt about St Valentine,  a Roman priest in the 3rd Century who helped young couples be married in secret; since Emperor Claudius was struggling to recruit young men into his army, he had  decided it was because they had too strong an attachment to their wives. He therefore banned all marriages and engagements in Rome! Valentine was jailed for his secret marriages and it is said even wrote a love letter to the jailers daughter. Hence the tradition of our Valentine’s cards today.

Tricky words and cvc words were the selection at the beginning of the week – all the children were able to read and find the right letters to match the words they’d chosen.

We looked our names and found the blocks that would spell our names – we counted how many letters were in our name and then compared with a friend – ‘ Oh you have 6 letters I have 4 in my name – you have 2 more than me’ This was a simple and effective way to get some meaningful counting, comparing and finding difference.

This week was all about love and our families, we borrowed the dolls house from nursery for the week.  It was busy all week with some super narrative between friends playing and re- enacting stories from their own home lives.

Some great reading and writing this week getting ready for our Valentine’s cards. All the children enjoyed having their hand painted and then a small heart placed in their palm before making the hand-print… some came out better than others!

The children’s own creativity had them decorating Valentine hearts…

This weeks circle time was thinking about who you love and why you love them? I can safely confirm that all readers of this blog were mentioned – mostly for cooking nice dinners!!

Some excellent pencil rolls, forward rolls, and balances this week in PE.

Lots of reading – from individual to group and caption or question reading. The children are really coming along and making great progress. We are very pleased.

It was lovely to see you all at the parent’s evenings this week. Ten minutes is such a short time, so please do pop in for a chat after school one afternoon if there is more you would like to discuss.

Have lovely half terms – I hope you enjoy a rest and some adventures too.

Hello, we’ve had another busy week in Reception Oak class – continuing with our trains and travelling out and about. We started the week with a survey of how we travel to school and discovered Harry comes in a Bat-mobile! I wasn’t expecting that! We learned how to do a tally to record the numbers of children that came in different ways. The children went on to draw a picture of how they come to school and we now have a pictograph on the wall depicting their varying modes of transport!

The classroom has been a hive of activity – the children had various vehicles with different wheels / tyres and used them to make tracks using paint. Simple but popular, useful for gross and fine motor skills.

Our paint tracks soon became pieces of modern art!!

Being able to sort and explain similarities and difference is a key goal in Reception, whether with colour/ pattern / number – this week we used vehicles.

The children challenged themselves with the task of designing their own vehicle and trying to make it. Two good examples of their work here:

Tricky to see in this photo but all the children have made a helicopter! In our story The Runaway Train by Benedict Blathwayt the hero of the story : Duffy the train driver has to catch up with his runaway train – he tries lorries, horses, bicycles and boats but manages to catch up his train with a helicopter! The children loved the excitement and drama in the story – mostly relayed through the pictures as the text is simple. They were all taken by the helicopters so we decided to make our own!

Our junk modelling work station is always busy – the conversation, sharing, listening, understanding and of course helping each other find the end of the sellotape is all invaluable for the prime areas of our Early Years curriculum. The children used their imaginations to make wonderful creations that they are always so proud of. Please keep filling our brown trunk outside the classroom with your clean recycling!

Our topic continued with not only knowing about vehicles but also how to fix them. This week we have had a bicycle maintenance station. Everybody has become fully involved in the challenge using real spanners to undo all the nuts and bolts on the bicycles. Wheels have been taken off, stabilisers detached and reattached, saddles and handlebars adjusted. The children love the independence of having real objects to use in their work. It’s always great to see how able and independent the children are with real life situations.

In our number work we have been identifying, comparing , understanding bigger and smaller numbers in relation to each other and finding the difference.

In PE we focused on forward rolls to varying degrees of success – we will persevere next week! Re saw the children identifying God’s animals and noticing the differences and similarities: large/ small/ tall/ short/ thin/ fat/ hairy/ furry/ smooth/ with a shell/ slow/ fast/ legs/ no legs and so on. After much discussion the children ‘ designed’ their own animal … this was fun and we got some fantastic pictures for our RE journal!

Te children have had fun learning the short and long oo sounds. Short as in ‘book’ long as in ‘ moon’ along with practising their tricky words. We’ve all had individual reading sessions and group reading sessions.

Thank you to all who managed to bring in a favourite book from home this week – I’m sorry it was such short notice. We had a lovely circle time discussing why we liked our book – talking about characters/ setting/ and how the story ends. The children that had non-fiction books enabled us to see a contents and how to use it to find out information you needed to know or were interested in. We managed to take a picture of each child with their book and photocopy the cover to use for our favourite book display. We interviewed the children and wrote down why they liked their book to add to our display.

Have a great week!

Hello and sorry for the blog delay – I was away for the weekend and no access to our school apps.

Anyway here is a very brief overview of some of the highlights of last week!  We started moving our OUT and ABOUT topic from the wintry weather to actually getting out and about – we focused on trains. We had a class discussion about trains,  stations and everything you might find or need on a train or in a station. The children were brilliant and came up with over 30 ideas – including the yellow line that you shouldn’t cross on the platform ‘ to keep you safe from the train line.’ We tried to incorporate as many of the children’s ideas as we could into our train role play area. The children made most of the resources they needed.

Painting the wheels for the train.

Painting the train.

Cutting out the tickets.

Eventually we had our very own train station.

Our stories for the week were The Little Red Train series of books by Benedict Blathwayt. They have fantastic illustrations, the children adore the stories and they inspired some lovely writing.  I can highly recommend them.

Of course the train track was out and the classroom turned into a huge track with multiple children, building and playing, using some fantastic language too. A few children said they had never been on a train – please do take your children on a quick train ride – they travel for free – show them the buffers, the tracks, signals, point and of course the yellow line on the platform!

Our fine motor work had the children weaving pipe cleaners  through colanders.The y all really enjoyed this and it is great for strengthening the muscles in the hands for letter formation.

We had a timed water tray activity – washing cars … it became quite competitive – it won’t be long until you can ask them to wash the family car!

This term we are doing  gym and last week we learnt pencil rolls and balances.

Sorry it’s brief – next blog at the weekend!

Thanks Erin Bibby