Hello and welcome to this weeks Oak Class Reception blog.

It’s been a busy week with all the usual bits and pieces – this weeks sounds were ‘ g’ ‘o’ ‘c’ ‘k’ and ‘ck’! Hopefully your child has been showing you the action we learn for each sound to help us remember it! Along with counting, recognising and matching numbers to amounts and finding missing numbers.

In PE we are currently practising, negotiating space, while on the move, skipping, hop-scotch, hopping, side-stepping, balancing and throwing and catching. Our RE topic this term looks at what is special in our world. What is special to us individually, what is  special to all of us and how we should look after firstly our special things, moving on to our immediate environment and then our local community area and ultimately our world.  The children are very thoughtful and contribute some insightful ideas for us all to think about and understand.

We have been busy welcoming many visitors to our class this week! We have been jolly lucky.

Dr Jarman, one of our lovely mummies, came to visit us. She brought along her very important black medical bag,  told us all about her medical instruments and what she does while she is at work. With some live demonstrations – I had my blood pressure measured- and was relieved to find it was within the realms of ‘ normal’, while poor Mrs Mooney found she’d hurt both arms with one being bandaged and the other placed in a sling!

All the children got to hold and examine all of Dr Jarman’s very special medical  equipment. Question time was rather,  a catalogue of recounts,  of each child’s last visit to a GP!!

Following Dr Jarman we were also visited by Brian the Firefighter. Brian really enjoyed his visit to our class – he explained carefully what he did while he was at work and how he helps people. He reminded us all about having a smoke alarm in our house and to test the batteries once a week. The children enjoyed his funny stories of rescuing cats from trees and being nipped by a pet chinchilla while he was rescuing it from a house fire!  He also brought a large black bag with him. His bag contained his uniform. He invited the children to try it on – they commented how hot it was to wear and just how heavy the boots and helmet were. Brian explained when the fire alarm sounds in the fire station he has to be fully dressed in his uniform and on the fire engine in less than 1 minute!

Our third visitor was Mrs McCall , an Occupational Health Professional and also a St. Matthew’s mummy. She wore her special uniform and told the children all about how she helps people get moving!  She explained, how through using everyday activities she helps people develop, recover, improve, as well as maintain the skills needed for daily living and working.

Our final visit of the week was from Mrs Rainey’s husband: PC Rainey!  He explained the role of a police constable and how the police help us in our communities. The children have enjoyed all our visitors this week, with fingers crossed more to come next week!

The rest of the week has seen Oak class refining their fine motor skills, investigating sizes, healthy eating and taking turns.  All the activities based around fruits, vegetables and herbs.

The children enjoyed squeezing citrus fruits into the water – fantastic to work those muscles for holding a pencil ! ( Incidentally this has made the classroom smell wonderful all week! – We might do this again ! )

They have used spoons to dig out seeds and flesh from tomatoes, kiwi’s peppers, cucumbers and the like. Again another great activity to improve muscle development in little hands.

A fun activity was to try and write with a carrot dipped in paint – everyone had a go with varying degrees of success!

We have sorted foods into healthy, unhealthy and ‘ not too bad’ ! We have understood it’s good to eat lots of fruit and vegetables and less sweets and chocolate!

Looking at sizes we all had a go at ordering our fruits and vegetables from smallest to largest.

The Shopping game proved a hit this week, with excellent turn taking in action.

Jacket potatoes, cocktail sticks and chopped up fruits were an excellent staring point for designing our very own Mr Potato Heads. All the children had fun making their own version!

Anytime we’ve had left this week has been taken up with preparing for Harvest Festival next Friday 18th October. Please do come along to St Matthew’s church to join in our school Harvest celebrations.

If you examine our photographs below, I wonder if you can guess which bible story Reception will be depicting during our service…

The clues are : Pairs of animals and a beautiful rainbow!

As an answer to a question to the Blog,  ( thank you for all the positive comments by the way !) our class representatives on the School Council are Izabella and Teo, voted by their class friends. They will attend meetings a few times a term to find out any changes or ideas the school has. They will report back the information to the class and then represent our feelings/ new ideas back to the school council. The School Council is run by our head boy and girl – Sam and Henrietta in Year 6.

Hope you are managing a good weekend, despite the rain!

Check back next week to see what Oak Class Reception have been up to.

Hello!

Another busy week in Reception has seen our home corner change from a school into a doctors surgery. This was greeted with much excitement, a whole host of ideas of what we might need in a doctors, along with many tales of visits to the doctor!

Our accompanying story was : Funny Bones by The Ahlbergs: 

The children have been extremely creative and been drawing skeletons, and trying to make skeleton pictures out of cotton buds – this is easier said than done!

Number work this week has comprised of lots of counting out loud, recognising numbers, ordering sets of numbers, matching numbers to amounts and writing numbers.

Our Reception reading helpers have all started over the past two week. The children all have the opportunity to read with a reading helper over the week. Lynn, Lesley and Mrs Robinson have this week got to know the children in preparation for all the lovely reading that is to come! Our Year 6 children have also started their reading buddy scheme, where they pair up with a Reception child to read to and listen to them read too. Our group reading will get up and running once we are a little more proficient.

Looking after ourselves in the doctors has included remembering our teeth. We’ve seen how many teeth we can rescue from the crocodile pond, brushed, brushed and brushed again – helping our fine motor skills and played a dice game adding teeth to the mouths!

We are looking forward from visits from a doctor and dentist in the weeks ahead to tell us all about their work helping people.

We have had activities to enhance our fine motor skills these past few weeks – hammering pegs into playdough has proved an unexpected hit! 

This week we went for it and all got changed for PE ( rather than just socks and shoes the previous two weeks). Mrs Mooney and I were pleasantly surprised at just how independent all the children are with their self help skills! Thank you so much to all, it’s hard to work and takes time to give little ones the opportunity to be dressing themselves, but other than a few buttons, they were fantastic and we were delighted!

We are also happy to announce our two School Council representatives from Reception Oak Class. Congratulations and good luck in your important roles.

We have fitted in so much more, but this  is a snap shot of the comings and goings of Reception Oak Class this week. Have a good week!

We are off to a flying start with our letters and sounds!

Hope you have all enjoyed a good week managing to avoid the rain showers unlike us! …The heavy rains this week reminded us just how tricky it is to keep 30 excited 4 year old’s  from becoming over zealous in puddles!  Despite wearing wellies many of our little ones had to change into spare clothes as they just couldn’t help themselves!!

We chanted  the nursery rhyme :

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain;
He stepped in a puddle,
Right up to his middle,
And never went there again.

This week has been very busy staring learning our sounds. We don’t learn sounds in alphabetical order but in an order that allows us to blend and make words quickly. This week we have covered s a t p.

We use lots of methods to learn, reinforce and practice all our new sounds.  All our sounds have an accompanying action – please see the above images to see the actions. For ‘a’ we have used taking a bite out of an apple rather than the ants up the arm action.

You can find out more about this phonics programme here: http://www.letters-and-sounds.com.

 Check how the sounds should sound by watching this video clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhXUW_v-1s

Tricky words this week have been ‘ he’ and ‘ she’.

We learn all of the sounds and tricky words rapidly and then spend the Spring term reinforcing and revisiting.

In other news,  this week has been ‘ interview week’  for various  members of our school community. Mr Quinn, ( Head teacher) Mrs Morgan,  ( Office admin) Mr Norris, ( school caretaker ) and Henrietta and Sam the head girl and boy have all been to visit us. They gave us a brief description of their roles and then opened the floor to questions. It was lovely to see the children thinking hard for appropriate questions. They were all enthralled by Mr Norris’ leaf blowing machine and quite liked the sound of the residential trips that our head boy and girl spoke about that take place further up the school. Best question of the week goes to Jack, who after listening to the many jobs Mr Quinn has to accomplish in a day asked: ‘ Do you like fish and chips?’ !

Our number work has seen us ordering more numbers, making patterns and matching actual amounts to written numbers.

Our first Number Bag of the year. The chosen number was ‘7’ and  lots of items that showed either the number ‘ 7’ or 7 objects  were brought in.  Friends to come and hold up her various items representing number 7! This weeks number bag has gone home with the lucky number being number 4!  We can’t wait to see what is brought in  next week to represent number 4.

Have a great weekend all.

We are all here! Everyone has now started in Reception and we are really proud of each and every one of them.  They have come in willing and ready and tackled each day with gusto and enthusiasm!

It’s been a second busy week settling in and getting started on our reading, writing and numbers!

This term’s topic is called ‘ WHO AM I? ‘ We are starting by taking a good look at ourselves…

All the children have managed a first piece of writing in their book and completed a first number task. We have practised name writing everyday and would ask you to practice this at home too if your child is developing name writing skills.

Our tricky word of the week was ‘ I ‘ – all the children made a big cardboard I for our wall. We used our big I’s for circle time and learnt taking turns, listening to our friends and found out something about each other as in turn we held up our I’s and said ‘ I am …. ‘ and ‘ I like…. ‘. We discovered lots of our class like sweets!

This week has seen the children have a close look at their eyes in a mirror and have a go at drawing them and finding the correct colour for their eyes. We used their eye pictures to create a bar chart of eye colour in Reception. The children managed to ask and answer questions regarding the graph. ‘ What is the most popular eye colour in our class? ‘ ‘ How many children have green eyes?’ and so on.

This weeks class discussion was all about our hands and what we use them for .. lots of good ideas here! Our focus was to reiterate that we use gentle or kind hands !  We documented all the great ideas and had a picture taken of our hands.

Our portrait wall is complete now this week’s starters have arrived. Everyone painted themselves in their new uniform, chatted about what they liked best about it and all wrote their name for our display.

While one of us is busy working one to one on directed tasks with the children, the rest are busying themselves with the continuous provision activities in the classroom. These times allow the children to play, explore, try something out that we’ve talked about, build, make, paint, cut and best of all learn to share and play with each other. Here are a few photos of some of the children working independently.

I’m looking forward to the fun that will be had next week in Oak Class Reception already, see you then!

Hello and welcome to Oak Class Reception’s blog.

Each week I will post a few photos of the children learning and playing. I will focus on the weekly themes, sounds, letters, numbers and stories.

This week we have all been settling in to the new school routine, as well as getting to know our friends.

All the children have managed to paint a self portrait of themselves, have a go at writing their name independently, admired and spoken about their new uniform, and managed to tell us a little about their summer’s.

Mrs Rainey has set up a ‘ cafe’ in our outdoor classroom and the children have been busy making salt dough food, creating signage and organising, chairs/ plates/ cups/ waiters and the like.  Creating fantastic opportunities to collaborate and get to know each other.

Our stories this week have all been starting school stories: 

More to follow next week as we have the final 5 children staring on Monday.

The children have been busy in the classroom playing schools in the role play area, building with lego and the big community blocks outside, riding the school bicycles,  and investigating all the activities on offer in the classroom.

The children have attended their first assembly and managed beautifully to sit and listen in the big assembly hall. They were also lucky enough to have a tennis session with coaches from The All England Tennis Club. Each year the AELTC vist our school, play some balance games and ball skill games with our children and ‘ talent spot’. If they spot an emerging talent ( a child with fantastic body awareness and control, with great hand eye coordination ) they invite the children to free tennis coaching at the club ‘ for life’ ! This is a scheme to find and train up the next generation of tennis players for England. Over the years many children from our school have been selected and enjoyed the free weekly tennis coaching. We are still waiting to spot a St Matthew’s alumni at Wimbledon though ! We will obviously let you know if your child was spotted by the coaches! They usually pick one or two from the whole school – we will see!

For information – our Reception Class meeting will take place on Wednesday 25th September – a chance for you to ask questions and hear how we are going to teach the children to read, write and develop number fluency. Please check your emails for the time of this meeting.

General class logistics:

• Please line up in front of the shed in the morning and say good bye to your children in the line.
• Please bring any recycling and fill up our big brown trug outside our outdoor classroom – we fly through cereal boxes and the like!
• Please put a named pair of wellies for your child in the other big brown trug outside the outdoor classroom.
• Your children know to place their water bottles on their named water bottle spot on the window sill and their PE bag stays on their peg until half term.
• Please only bring your book bag in on the day named on the front of your yellow book. NOT EVERYDAY. 
• Book bags go in the boxes on top of the trays. There is an in box and out box! Please don’t forget to take your book bag home when it has been changed. The children are currently bringing 4 books of their choice home a week. As term progresses we will add ‘ reading books’ into the bag for them to read to you.
• Please contribute crackers/ breadsticks/ biscuits/ chedders etc to our class snack scheme every so often. This means there is NO NEED TO BRING A SEPARATE SNACK EACH DAY. 
• Any letters or bits and pieces the children have completed and want to bring home will either be in their tray or book bag. We also have the green going home box for larger items. Please check your child’s tray and the going home box daily! Please feel free to use the trays for party invitations and thank you letters too.

Sorry for all these logistics – once in place – the year runs very smoothly!

Thanks so much for your support – please pass on the details of this blog to all the parents/ carers in the class. Also I will post a weekly overview above the book bag boxes each week outlining the main activities /objectives of the week. Please can someone take a picture of it and put it on the class whatsapp group as some parents won’t be dropping off and picking up and might miss it.

Enjoy this super sunny weekend!

Looking forward to next week already!

Mrs Bibby 🙂

Mrs Mooney and I would like to say a huge thank you to all the parents and children of Oak Class. We are both so thankful to you all, for allowing us to care of your little ones on this first big step into the world that is school. We have learnt so much about them (and ourselves) and feel we know, care and love them as you do! Thank you for all your support and the overwhelming gifts. They are not opened yet but we will look forward to opening and enjoying them over the summer. Enjoy a safe and happy summer; enjoy the children, do some fun things but know that it’s important for them to get bored and work out how to entertain themselves too!  Take photos and precious memories,  as from now the primary school years will fly by.

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH

Mrs Bibby and Mrs Mooney X

A few photos from this week at school :

French day

Summer fun in the playground.

Bounc-a-thon for computers

Oak Class has been transformed, this week, into a holiday destination – we have a sandy beach for sandcastle competitions, ice- creams, shell collecting, picnics  and  a Punch and Judy show!

Continuing our fishy theme we have moved on from Tiddler to The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. We have delved into the depths of the ocean, we watched some amazing videos in life under the sea. Everyone agreed we should all watch the edited highlights of Blue Planet. If you are able,  do show some clips of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet to your child  as they were were genuinely transfixed by the few short clips we watched about life under the sea.

The Rainbow Fish story lent itself to talk, listen, write and put into practice how to be a good friend, just as The Rainbow Fish does – we’ve been busy!

Meanwhile,  since we are coming to the end of our time in Reception,  we’ve been having some fun with our learning of phonics and played some good sound games on our interactive smart board.

The nursery role play area is currently an aeroplane which has tied in nicely with our beach holiday destination role-pay. During our ‘ mix-up’ session this week children really extended their play across the two rooms – flying off on holiday from nursery and enjoying their time on the beach in Reception! Below is an example of just one of the luggage vans taking luggage to the aeroplane!

As the year has progressed the children have been spending more and more time at our writing table – it’s been jam-packed every day for the last term!  They are independently getting themselves ready for Year 1!

The children took it upon themselves to do tally charts this week. New pens arrived in the writing area and the tally charts have been all about our favourite colours. Over the week nearly every child has made a colour chart and asked everyone and anyone they  have come into contact with what their favourite colour might be; and have then noted it down in a tally! At the last count pink and turquoise were the favourite colours.

All the usual Reception business carried on, under the sea puzzles were completed, fishy word searches and oh so much junk modelling! The love of a cardboard box never ends!

A busy week next week including French Day, Sports Day and a Bounc-a-thon!

Don’t forget to pop in on Tuesday from 3.30pm until 6pm to have a chat and of course pop into Year 1 to meet Miss Leutchford.

It will be the last blog next week. See you then.

Happy weekend all!

This weeks circle time,  or PSHE as it’s known,  caused much debate and a whole spectrum of emotions were explored. I had a large bowl of sweets and explained to the children that  I would like to share them. They were all delighted at the idea of an afternoon sweet treat and waited patiently for me to share. I announced I was going to share my sweets with the 4 year olds… there are just three children aged 4 in our class. I gave them a sweet each and sat back down in the circle.  Confused looks were exchanged. Whispers  of ‘ That’s not fair!’ could be heard. We questioned why wasn’t it fair? There were a range of replies – some angry, some upset, some confused at my non-teacher like behaviour. One 4 year old child with a sweet broke it in half and shared it with his neighbour.  Simply amazing understanding and selfless behaviour!  I went on to share my sweets with the girls … this still left the boys sweet- less.  We talked about how the children felt who had a sweet and how the children without a sweet felt. Of course we finished with the rest of the children having a sweet too. This simple exercise enabled the children to identify the emotion they were feeling and helped them understand how others might be feeling.  Hopefully they will remember how they felt when they are next in a similar sharing situation and think of what the right thing to do would be!

This weeks text is Tiddler by Julia Donaldson and Axel Sheffler.

In the story, Tiddler,  a fish,  is always always late for school,  so this week we have been learning about time –  reading an analogue clock on the hour.  The children a have been calibrating their own clocks and using a split pin to attach the hands.

The main theme of the Tiddler story is actually story telling,  as Tiddler makes up lots of tales as to why he was late again. We explored the story, thinking about how stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. We are all writing about what happens in the beginning, middle and end of the Tiddler story. The children have used a clock and fish to retell the Tiddler story themselves.

The rest of our week has been wrapping up our pirate theme … however we are still waiting for a reply from Captain Red-Beard as what to do with all his treasure that we found. We wrote a reply to him on our pirate paper and put it in a bottle. Mrs Morgan said she would take it down to the beach where she found his original message in the bottle … we will wait and see!

Meanwhile we’ve been playing pirate games, taking turns and counting treasure won …

Counting Captain Red-Beards treasure…

and playing games with it… how many pieces can you find in 1 minute?!

Not forgetting the beautiful mermaids treasure. We have been matching describing words to their treasure and writing our own describing words to match the smooth, shiny, gleaming, transparent,  shimmering treasure – just a few of the describing words the children came up with!

Last but not least we took part in the whole school ‘ Off by Heart’ poetry competition. We all learnt a poem – ‘ I think I Saw a Mermaid’ by Nick Sharratt. We practised in the classroom and choose 9 children to represent our class in the competition. They were extremely brave and recited their poem in front of the whole school and three important judges – namely Mother Helen from St Matthews Church, Mrs Warner the Deputy Head and Elizabeth Broad our Chair of Governors. The gave a good performance representing  Oak Class and we are all extremely proud of them.

Check back next week to hear more Oak Class news!

What a week in Reception, Oak Class!

We took our work on 3D shape to another level and lots of the children managed to construct their own 3D shapes with straws and connectors. Very impressive spatial skills and a deeper understanding of a 3D shape!

Of course, when the sun shines, we always take advantage of the weather and our outdoor areas – this week we headed off to the field – more practice for sports day in action!

The real fun began when we headed back to the classroom. In the middle of our whole class learning time on the carpet,  there was a loud knock at the door…

We all wondered who it could be …

In strode Mrs Morgan, she  was carrying an old bottle. She explained she’d found it whilst strolling along the beach… since she knew our class were learning about pirates she bought it to us to see what was inside!

Low and behold we found a message from a pirate! A real pirate named Red- Beard. The note explained he’d lost his treasure and hoped Oak Class could find it for him. The paper was old, damp from the sea  and smelt of musty old pirates – we all had a good sniff!  Always up for a challenge – pirate hats on,  telescopes ready – we headed out into the playground to hunt for old Red-Beards’s treasure.

We searched high and low through our telescopes,  that we we have been making over the past week,  and sure enough began to find treasure – gold and sparkly treasure!

Following our treasure hunt we returned to the classroom to count Captain Red-Beard’s treasure – we used a 100 square and discovered  we had found more than 100 pieces of treasure.

It was time to write a reply to Captain Red-Beard! We made pirate paper as best we could, dipping our card into tea,  and Mrs Bibby burnt the edges for us. We are going to send our reply messages back to Captain Red-Beard via a bottle and Mrs Morgan who will be heading back to the beach soon.

Meanwhile the children’s hand- made compasses and treasure maps have really enhanced our role play pirate ship. The pirate and mermaid games that the children are playing out are developing into wonderful stories.

All in all another fun week in Oak Class, although rather low on numbers!

We hope all the children feel better and are back at school at soon as possible!

Enjoy the sunshine!

Hello !

This week our classroom role play has transformed into a Pirate Ship! We’ve got plenty of treasure, eye- patches, telescopes, compasses, a crows nest, Polly the parrot, huge treasure chests and even a plank!  Of course you can’t have pirates without beautiful mermaids and many of the children have enjoyed donning the mermaid outfits and fanning themselves while ordering the gung-ho pirates of the class about!  The children of course have made it their own, inventing pirate adventure stories, learning how to share all that treasure as well as speaking like real pirates.

Our small world area has a pirate ship, a treasure island and a compass – the children are really enjoying directing the pirates to steer their ship towards the island and then to find the X marking the spot of the hidden treasure!

We have read a host of pirate and mermaid stories this week but one book in particular had all the children mesmerised. Do find it in the library or local bookshop if you fancy It:

Can You Catch a Mermaid?  Jane Ray.

The pirate theme has continued in our number work, halving various amounts of treasure… along with sorting some 3D shapes ( I think calling the school set of standard 3D shapes treasure, might be  a step too far!) Recognising, naming and sorting in various ways has been order of the week – a favourite sort has been 3D shapes that roll and those that don’t !

As a end of week treat and highlight, Mrs Shaffer, a lovely lady who has been volunteering in our Early Years for more than 10 years, bought Herbie her tortoise in to see the children. They were all fascinated especially by his ‘ old face’ and ‘ rough skin’. All the children were able to stroke Herbie if they wanted and give him a treat – Herbie was in his element with a feast of strawberries!

That’s all for this week but I’m sure another busy week in Reception Oak Class awaits!