Monthly Archives: October 2020

Take a Peek at: last Monday morning in Reception!!

Posted on by
Reply

 

Hi Parents and Carers,

I hope everyone remains well and you are all coping at home. Here is a snapshot of our Monday morning last week… these are the activities the children would have been doing for the first part of last week…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The children all made a blue heart for a school rainbow during our Harvest celebration which unfortunately we have missed as it was on Friday. I have added some links,  onto Seesaw,  of a video that was made of Mother Helen and Father Alistair celebrating Harvest with a bubble of children from Key Stage Two. Our blue hearts are visible on the screen! They represented water and the children managed to think of so many ways to thank god for how we depend upon and enjoy using water.

 

Here is a wall display of our Peepo work from last week. Under each coloured paper is a beautiful drawing of what each child can see from their bedroom window. They have chosen one particular aspect of their picture to have the peep hole showing. They were all very proud of their lovely work.

These two boys were so proud of their amazing building creations on Monday! I couldn’t not include them!

 

Keep safe and well and we look forward to seeing you back at school on Thursday 22nd October.

 

 

Take a Peek at Peepo!

Posted on by
Reply

Hello!

We’ve had a lovely week in Reception. This week we had great fun with another classic favourite: Peepo by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.

Peepo! (Storytime Giants): Amazon.co.uk: Ahlberg, Allan, Ahlberg, Janet: Books

The children were great – joining in the refrain and spotting lots of objects some  they knew,  others that were quite alien to them,  as the book is set in post war Britain.

We went on to  adapt the story to suit us :

Here’s a group of children

1, 2 ,3

Sitting quietly on the carpet,

What do they see?

And talked about what we could see. We talked about looking into the playground and looking through own bedroom windows. The children have made some beautiful drawings which we are putting on display next week.

The Peepo story has leant itself to some lovely work from the children – some emerging writing and reading as well as many of our number objectives.

The children in the story go out fishing and sailing toy boats. Our water tray helped us reconstruct the scene and encouraged super counting of fish, adding up how many fish had been caught altogether and some taking away when lots of fish escaped back into the water!

From our Owl Babies work last week, the children had made some beautiful owls so one of this weeks tasks was to construct a tree for our owls to be in. The children all got involved in the tree creation, starting by painting the trunk!

The children had lots of opportunity to look and see in Where’s Wally books and in our Peepo story. They all loved the Where’s Wally books ( might be an idea for Christmas if you don’t have one at home already!) our clipboards were full of emergent writing of what the children had seen through the magnifying glasses in the books.

Our baby clinic role play was coming to an end this week so we had a messy baby food making station – lots of good ideas on what flavours and textures the babies might enjoy. Apologies for the state of the children’s clothes this week, we did have aprons on but they weren’t quite up to the challenge!

 

Looking at children’s language development was key this week, particularly when engaging in our undergrowth tray – What could they find? Using some descriptive vocabulary for colour/ texture/ size.

The children are really strong with their number work – they are practising matching quantity to numeral ( after recognising/ ordering numerals).

The writing tables had lots of interest this week. Encouragingly lots of the children were so immersed into our story that the try writing and emergent writing came thick and fast with some excellent independent sound work.

Construction is very popular, both big and small. It is a brilliant tool to observe turn taking, sharing, creativity, problem solving – the list goes on.

 

 

Our carpet sessions are always good fun, we do shared writing ( having a go writing on whiteboards) and hold up our boards when we have completed the task. These  shared writing sessions take place everyday and sometimes twice a day if we can fit them in on our very busy schedule!

To match our Peepo story we played lots of Eye Spy this week. Good fun – especially when the child leading the game forgets what they were thinking of or changes their mind and sound to evade their Eye Spy being found! We decorated telescopes to help with our Eye Spy game too.

Here are the children’s lovely Owls on display on the tree that they created.

We are having a good look at reading and how we can change with our usual approach which included reading helpers from St Matthew’s Church and Year 6 reading buddies. Due to the current situation with Covid 19 we are unable to use these integral tools in our learning to read approach. We have been thinking of different ideas and the Year 6 children are going to video themselves, individually,  reading a story for the Reception children. We would like to broaden this and invite parents, grandparents, relatives and other friends to record themselves,  reading an age appropriate story,  that we would be able to share with the children during school time. It would need you to give permission for your image to be broadcast to the class and is helpful if recorded in a neutral room/ environment. Do email if you think you would be happy to do this at any time over the school year. ( office@st-matthews.merton.sch.uk)  It’s vital for children learning to read to know that reading is important and worthwhile. To see a family member actually sitting down to enjoy a good story instills reading as a way of life for the children not just a necessity.  Thank you parents.

Next week is Harvest week at St Matthew’s. We will have a Farm Shop Role play, some fantastic texts to read,  including Oliver’s Vegetables, and a busy time learning our words and song for our Harvest presentation which sadly this year will be shared with you virtually, rather than our usual Harvest church service.

I’ll look forward to seeing you at the gate! Have a good rest of the weekend.

Erin Bibby

The following Websites all have age appropriate learning games if you wish to try any at home:

http://www.crickweb.co.uk/Early-Years.html

http://www.literactive.com/Download/stories.asp?Flag=en-gb

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/resources/phase/1

 

Take a Peek at The Owl Babies

Posted on by
Reply

 

Hello! Staying with our baby theme we centred our learning around The Owl Babies by Martin Waddell – a familiar tale for all. We enjoyed the story , all children managed to sequence the story through pictures and match quotations from the story to the correct picture – the very beginning of learning how to do comprehension.

Owl Babies By Martin Waddell

The children enjoyed our Owl Babies themed activities, working together to build nests for the baby owls…

Everybody painted their very own baby owl…

As well as deciding that Owls like to make their nests in big trees , like horse chestnuts … leading us onto finding conkers and using them for some number work – counting and finding out how many conkers would fit into various sized containers.

 

We had a series of owl pictures ready to cut and stick. The children practised their fine motor cutting skills and placed and arranged some impressive owl designs.

On the writing table the children thought of and wrote owl names … some really fun ones – they ranged from Flappy Flap and Fluffy to more serious owls such as Walter and Reginald! I wonder what stories that family have been reading?!!

As usual a range of construction toys were available for all sorts of wonderful creations. Working together the children manage to feed ideas to and from each other and make some super designs.

Lots of turn taking games enable the children to work together, be patient and build relationships with each other.

We have worked hard with numbers this week: recognising, ordering, counting, matching quantity to numerals, grouping, sorting, counting from a larger group, checking one to one correspondence skills, joining 2 sets of objects and finding the total along with knowing one more/ one less than a given number. We also looked at 2D shape and the children made their own AB pattern.

There were plenty more activities to complete this week including a very tricky pattern puzzle,  following patterns with the compare bears, floating, sinking and balancing with conkers in the water tray and of course more role play in our baby clinic.

More fun was had this week in PE – we cut our changing time by 10 minutes compared with last week – brilliant! We encourage the children to change independently, although of course help with buttons, zips, tights and so on. The children are all doing very well with their self help skills. At home, please encourage your child to get dressed/ undressed independently – start with getting into pyjamas and nighties. The children are all very determined and we praise any self help / dressing/ looking after their belongings highly – even when the children get dressed with all clothes inside out and back to front!  This week we had 1 grey school sock left over. All children were wearing 2 socks at the end of the day, so we were unable to re- unite it with its owner – if you are missing a sock just let me know! Once in PE we are learning about space, speed, direction and various ways to move. All the children are enjoying the lessons and we have some super sportsmen and women in the class.

During playtime all the girls joined in a hoop game – the children are having so much fun at school, and learning lots too! Thank you for all your support. It’s not easy to build relationships with each family, as we usually try to do, in these strange times but I hope your children are coming home exhausted, hungry and happy! They are all doing great things at school and you should all be very proud.  Have a super weekend.