Welcome back to the final half of the summer term in Reception – we hope everyone had a lovely, restful half term break.  We are looking forward to finishing off the year with lots of learning through play and hopefully lots of fine weather!

This week, we were very pleased to welcome a new classmate!  As we do not use the children’s names on our blog, I will not be introducing her by name here, but I have no doubt your child will be able to update you!  We warmly welcome her, along with her family, to both our class and our school.

We continued with our topic this week, reading all about the different creatures that make a “Commotion in the Ocean”.

 We have also been very busy practising for our class assembly which will take place next Friday 16th June at 9am.  We hope many of you will be able to join us on Friday for the assembly.

Our new number of the week has been chosen as number:

This Wednesday 7th June at 7pm at Hollymount school.

Speakers will include:

• Mrs Jackson (Headteacher Hollymount School)
• Mr David Smith (Headteacher Coombe Boys School)
• Rob Hatley (Chair of Governors Hollymount School)
• Stephen Alambritis (Leader of Merton Council)
• Carl Quilliam (Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate)
• Statement to be read out on behalf of Stephen Hammond (Conservative Parliamentary Candidate)
• Other speakers to be confirmed, including Imran Uddin from the Labour Party.

Dear All,

Parental access to Seesaw is available all this week.  Enjoy!

Miss C.

This week we joined the rest of the school in a celebration of Book Week.  The theme of the week was ‘Dreams’ and, in Reception, we linked the theme to our topic by reading a particularly heartwarming story called ‘Mermaid’ written by the CBeebies presenter Cerrie Burnell.  The story introduces the idea of a dream as something you wish for (i.e. the little boy wishes he could swim) as well as the idea of a dream as being something you experience when you are asleep (i.e. the little boy dreams he is swimming underwater with his new friend).

Later in the week, we talked about there being two types of nighttime dreams; some good and some bad.  Many of the children had lots to say on the matter and were very familiar with the feelings of being scared in the night, as described by the little girl in the second story we read this week; ‘Grandmother’s Dreamcatcher’.  We didn’t dwell on the subject of bad dreams or on feelings of being scared for long, but we all agreed everybody has bad dreams sometimes, even grown ups, and the most important thing to remember is that they are not real.

‘Grandmother’s Dreamcatcher’ is a North American book and tells the story of a little girl staying with her Grandmother while her parents are away.  Her Grandmother shows her how to make a dreamcatcher which catches bad dreams and only allows sweet dreams through.

We decided to make our own beautiful dreamcatchers which we will be bringing home shortly.

We finished off Book Week with a whole school ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ workshop. Each class worked with the director for half an hour and, at the end of the day, all the segments were put together to create the play!  The children in Reception and Year 1 worked together to recite ‘Puck’s Favourite Poem’.  It was all very exciting and a fantastic way to finish the week.

We finally said goodbye to our 6 chicks this week as Farmer Alice returned to collect them. Before they left, each child had a chance to hold one on their lap and we managed to get some lovely photos:

Our Star of the Week did another super job filling up his number bag with 20 objects.

We hope everyone has a wonderful half term! It is so hard to believe that when we come back it will be the final half of the summer term.  We will continue with our topic work, spend lots of time outside and celebrate the school’s 150th birthday!

If you are looking for a half term challenge how about trying some of these from the National Trust’s list of 50 things to do before you’re 11 and 3/4:

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/50-things-to-do-before-youre-11–activity-list

Have fun!

It has been a particularly exciting week with the arrival of our baby chicks, along with the kidnapping (by pirates) and daring rescue (by us) of the Singing Mermaid!

On Tuesday morning, the chick eggs finally started to hatch and by the end of the day, six wet and exhausted babies had pecked their way out into the world.

We named the chicks: Superchick, Chicky, Sweet, Rose, Annabel and Daisy.  The names were decided with a democratic vote.  Each child chose their preferred name from a large list of suggestions and wrote it on a post-it note.  We could then clearly see which names had the most votes.

The six chicks are all doing well and have been busy eating, drinking, pecking, cheeping, napping and growing.  At some point next week, they will be returning to Deen City Farm. If you have not already done so, please feel free to pop in and meet them with your child, after school one day next week, before they leave us.

On Tuesday, we also read the story of the Singing Mermaid who is tricked into leaving her home by the seashore to become a circus performer.  In the end, along with the help of her friends, she comes up with a clever plan to escape and find her way home.

The Singing Mermaid came to visit us in class and showed us how she managed to get back to the sea from the circus.  Can you remember what she did? Remember, she doesn’t have any legs, only a tail…

On Wednesday morning, we made a rather startling discovery in the water tray.  A message in a bottle had been left there overnight and it read:

The poor Singing Mermaid had been kidnapped once again.  Oh dear!  The children wasted no time in coming up with a plan to get the Singing Mermaid back and after much discussion we decided to write back to the pirates offering them 57 pieces of treasure in exchange for the safe return of the Singing Mermaid.  We popped our message back in the bottle and left it in the water tray after school.

The following day, the message had gone and a new message had appeared:

Those cheeky pirates!  Luckily, Reception are such good treasure hunters that they weren’t in the least fazed by the thought of having to find 100 pieces of treasure.  Working in ten teams of three children, each team searched the playground for 10 pieces of treasure.

Back in the classroom, we used a hundred square to carefully lay out the treasure in rows of 10.  Can you remember how many rows of 10 we needed to make 100?

We carefully poured the 100 pieces of treasure into a treasure box and wrote several messages back to the pirates letting them know we were ready for the exchange.

On Friday, another message appeared along with a treasure map!  This time, the message read: to Reception, bring the treasure, follow the map, from the pirates.

Without thinking twice, we grabbed our treasure box, the map and the Singing Mermaid’s empty shell and set off on our daring rescue mission.

In no time at all, we could see the pirate ship in the distance (in the KS2 playground!).  We snuck up on the ship, without a sound, so as not to alert the pirates to our presence.  Once there, two very brave children searched the lower deck, while another two climbed the ladder to the top.  As we all held our breath, the Singing Mermaid was found, on the top deck, cowering in a corner.

We quickly placed the treasure box in the spot where we had found her and raced back to the safety of our classroom. Phew! What a relief it was to have the Singing Mermaid back safe and sound!

In other news…

The children continue to be very inspired by our topic this term, building their own pirate ships outside, playing in the new pirate ship role-play area, drawing treasure maps and writing messages in bottles!

Our Star of the Week did yet another fantastic job of filling up his number bag with all things related to the number 19.

And the new number of the week has been chosen as number:

Weekend Challenge: can you make your own number bag for the number 20, or perhaps choose a bigger number!!

Just a reminder that it is mufti day tomorrow! The details below were sent out in an email last week…

Dear Reception to Year 6 parents/carers,

We are writing to inform you about the Wilberforce house event that is taking place on 19^th May in favour of Alzheimer’s Society.

Next Friday, all children will be coming in to school dressed in their own clothes. However, at least one piece of their clothing should be blue*. For the privilege, they need to bring £1 to school. In addition to this, we will be selling a range of pins (£1), lanyards (50p), wristbands (£1) and badges (£1) in the play ground before and after school. We are also hosting various different ‘memory’ games on the field at lunch time to help the children get a glimpse of what life for people with Alzheimer’s is like. All children will be invited to participate.

Wilberforce’s chosen charity this year is Alzheimer’s Society, which is a great charity that invests in researching for a possible cure for Dementia; providing carers and support to patients or families and also organising fundraising events. I’m sure many of you have heard of the disease or know someone living with it. We have recently been in touch with Alzheimer’s Society and they have very kindly agreed to send us a fundraising pack, some wristbands and pin badges.

Thank you for your support,

Yours sincerely,

Wilberforce House captains,

Kristian and Georgia. Yr 6

*jeans are not accepted as their blue piece of clothing.

We dove head first into our topic work this week as we read several pirate stories, both fiction and non-fiction.  We have been busy making pirate hats, painting treasure and sailing the high seas with treasure maps!

We also read a lovely story about a lonely lion who finds living on a desert island a little too quiet for his liking.  He decides to send out a message in a bottle to find some friends and soon enough his island begins to fill up with visitors.

We also found a message in a bottle that had been left in our own water tray!  We carefully opened it up and discovered it was a message from Blue Fish, thanking the Rainbow Fish for sharing his scales. We were quite inspired by the idea of writing a message in a bottle and have been busy writing many of our own.  One of us (below) was delighted to receive a message in a bottle from a friend!

We also found time to revise the trigraph ‘igh’ and the digraph ‘oa’.  The children are really becoming such phonics experts; quickly and accurately identifying which sound is in which word (e.g. lightning, boat, knight, moat, goat, floating).

Weekend challenge: have a go at playing buried treasure: select phase 3, then set 1-7 plus ‘igh’ or ‘oa’.  Remember to put the real words in the treasure chest and the pretend words in the rubbish bin.  You could even make your own buried treasure game: here are some printables to get you started!

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/PrintablesBuriedTreasure.html

Our number of the week was number 6 and our star of the week did a super job of filling up his number bag with all sorts of things related to the number 6. Well done!

Our new number of the week has been chosen as number:

This week we also spent some time trying to find numbers on a blank hundred square. The children were given a number and had to explain how they might find out where it is hiding (e.g. can you find the number 11? can you explain why you think it it there?).  We use something called Number Splat which the children find quite appealing thanks to the splat sound you can hear when you touch different numbers!

Weekend challenge: using number splat, can you find the numbers 5, 18, 26, 44 and 78? Can you explain how you found them?