A very tricky good afternoon to all our lovely families. Here are some bits and pieces we’ve been up to this week.

Following on from our weather station, thermometer making and life with Elmer, ( who always seems to be under a rain cloud!)  the children have made rain sticks . They thoroughly enjoyed this activity.

It was science week this week. Mr Peck began the week with a fab assembly introducing us to some amazing scientific concepts. The week was based around environmental science and a very visual activity of how the ice in the arctic is melting at an incredible rate and the effects on the wildlife – the children stood on a huge tarpaulin (to represent ice) and pretended to be seals. Other children surrounded it pretending to be polar bears. Every 5 or so minutes during the assembly the ‘ seals’ had to fold their tarpaulin ice in half, without any falling off to be eaten by the polar bears. It wasn’t long before we had a very visual idea of the impact climate change is having on our wildlife – with the seals all crammed onto a tiny block of ice desperate not to be caught by the circling polar bears.

Linking to this, our class’ science experiment has been to try and make a hole through a block of ice. Armed with ice blocks, hammers, salt and water the children set to work with varying degrees of success. By the end of the week – we found out that by pouring water on the same spot for a minute or so made a perfect hole through the ice! We were due to present this phenomenon in Mondays assembly, instead maybe you could try it at home!

In maths we were finding 2, 3, 4 or even 5 numbers that added together would make 10!

In literacy we have concentrated on segmenting longer words – in groups of three – segmenting words into sounds, writing each sound on a different post it note and then blending the sounds to write them on the whiteboard.

In RE we continued to look at our world, thinking about how WE can look after it. The children have learnt the following song – they know lots of actions – please let them sing it / show you !

Sorry to spoil the surprise ( don’t tell your little one I have) but much of this week was dedicated to Mother’s Day – we made cards, did some writing and made a special stone for you to keep!

Thank you for letting us look after your little ones, we’ve had so much fun and are looking forward  to seeing them all again very soon. Good luck with your ‘ home learning’ – just have a go and do your best! If you can’t do it – please just read a story EVERY DAY to your child and ask them to read a bit to you too.

Hello !

This week we have immersed ourselves in flags, their designs, what country they represent and even made our own flags. We have added an extra role play area of Jack and the Beanstalk,   alongside our weather station,  to help with our writing this week too.

We have watched this flag video with the sound muted and listened to Wavin’ Flag as our sound track – the children loved it and were so interested in each countries flag design. Asking some excellent questions. I’ve attached both links below in case you want to have a look with them at home. The children talked about their  family affiliations from all around the world, as well as remembering countries they have visited. It has enabled some really lovely work in  which everybody had a shared interest.

A line of our own flags. 

Our 10 green bottles were a source of much fun this week. Task: to order them either by number or capacity … not take the lids off and squirt the red water everywhere! Safe to say Mrs Mooney and I won’t be using this activity again!! I live and learn! On the plus side, capacity was an interesting concept for lots of the children, with many referrals to cups/ bottles being filled at bath time to play with. Talk about more/ less/ full empty/ half full and so on at home – the children love playing with water!

Calculators caused a stir and enabled the children to show me numbers / match numbers and read numbers successfully. Everyone had a go with the calculators – it was a great example of number work and even gave us evidence for technology and understanding the world as we talked about solar power as well.

More number work – this time to fill the cups with the right number of cubes in  a set time. Much enjoyment, hilarity of cups falling over and lots of checking each others work to see how each other had got on. Fantastic matching and counting with extensions of  higher level questioning: Which two cups do I  need to make 10?  If all the cups are correct how many cubes do we have altogether? and so on…

Our dice activity this week was a directed task,  recorded in our  Challenge Books. Each child had to roll the dice, read and record the number they had rolled. They then had to understand a range of positional language such as: ind the number on the opposite side/ underneath/ the number at the bottom  – they then recorded this number followed by adding the two numbers together. If you have a dice, ask them to show you – they should be able to tell you the magic number they found each time!

Our Jack and the Beanstalk area had a beanstalk, had the giant, had a chicken and a golden egg, even a cow but not a castle… the children took it upon themselves to build their own giants castle.

Writing numbers is always tricky in Reception – its never easy to know where to start when writing a number. These number moulds help the children work out which way to write their numbers by following the route of the marble in the mould.

We talked a lot about 2D shape this week – the children enjoyed copying or designing their own flag using the shapes.

In PE we are getting adventurous and completing our forward rolls at height, with climbing, balancing, jumping and bench bunny hops too.  The children really enjoy our warm ups and are all fab at squats,  star jumps and burpees!

Have a great week!

Hello!

Firstly an apology,  the target sheets that went out on Wednesday evening were supposed to come home the Friday before half term, just after parent’s evening.   Unfortunately they helpfully got ‘filed’ instead. Thank you to the mum that reminded us this week.

This week we have continued analysing the weather – enjoying our daily dose of the weather forecast carrying on with lots of weather activities in our weather station.

Our stories have been from the Elmer collection of books by David MacKee. They also make good links to our weather – there’s always a rain cloud looming for Elmer!

The children have really enjoyed trying to create their own colourful patchwork elephants…

Flooded the classroom creating various rain showers…

Made a collage our own Elmer for display…

In this weeks directed writing we have made story boards of the Elmer story and then used our story boards to re-write the story. We are moving writing on from words and captions to extended writing. Using all our sound knowledge to segment the words we need for our sentences. The children firstly need to think of a sentence, count the words in the sentence, start sounding out and segmenting the first word, write it, using a finger space and moving on to repeat for each word in the sentence. For lots this is a long and laborious process It really starts to get them going on writing independently.

We have finished our second set of sounds – since half term covering:  ear, er, ur, air, ture, ow, oi, igh, oa  all tricky ones to remember when reading and writing so any practice at home on these trickier  sounds would be great!

Written all about Elmer and the weather…

Matched clothing to various weather types…

Used sound pegs to combine fine motor and segmenting words:

Used the numicon and peg boards to create patterns like Elmer’s. The children started on AB patterns ( ie red/blue/red/blue)  and continued  up to ABCD patterns. ie 4 colours in turn. This is a tricky skill when you are small.

Our directed maths task was a huge hit. We had dice,  ( including an interactive one on the smart-board) grids of ten squares and we simply had to roll the dice and tick off the correct number of squares… the children had to : Recognise the numbers on the die, tell me the highest and lowest number that could be found on the die, work out how many more they need to roll to fill their grid and if they could,  tell me how many more rolls of the dice they needed to do this,  including what they would need to roll. Fun with lots of thinking too.

Number work continued with our thermometer making. The children have been very interested in temperature and regularly checking our weather station thermometer so we decided to make our own thermometers.

The children also found ways to make 10 using the numicon boards. They recorded their findings…

Using our Elmer’s to help with our number work was super – the children enjoyed working out how many footprints an elephant makes as he walks along! We will have them reciting the 4 x table before the year is out!!

As always, building and junk modelling is a massive hit everyday…

What fabulous World Book Day costumes – just fantastic – I’m sorry to have missed them. Well done Reception ( especially parents!) on brilliant character choices and superb costumes!

Have a great weekend Oak Class !