Our topic in Oak Class this term will be ‘Message in a Bottle’.  We will be reading all sorts of fishy and pirate tales and using our imaginations to sail the high seas.  You can download our new topic booklet here which will give you some ideas for the sorts of activities you might like to do at home to further support your child’s interest and learning within this topic.

Given that our whole school theme at St. Matthews this term will be friendship, we decided to start our topic by revisiting the story of the ‘Rainbow Fish’.  The children are always gripped by the story and its simple message of making friends through sharing. We decided to see if we could be Rainbow Fish ourselves this week by saying things like “yes, you can borrow the pink pen” instead of “no, I had it first” and “yes, you can have one of my red lego pieces” instead of “but I need it”.  We are working on a Rainbow Fish display for the classroom and we will be looking out for examples of these kinds of ‘friendship’ words to add to it over the coming weeks.

We also read the story of ‘Something Else’ which encouraged us to think about differences between us and our friends.  We realised that we already have lots of friends who are very different to us.  Some of our friends speak different languages to us.  Some of them like to eat different foods.  Others are even girls!

Of course, we have also been very busy looking after our chick eggs.  We are doing a great job of keeping them safe and warm in the incubator and we have been carefully counting down the days on our 21 day number chart.  Yesterday (Friday) was day 11.  Can you work out how many days there are left until our chick eggs begin to hatch?

We also watched an incredible animation of the growth of the chicks within the eggs during the 21 days.  You can watch it here again:

Weekend Challenge:  can you find out what the chicks start to have on day 12 and on day 13?  Write down a sentence or two to explain what they now have.

Our Star of the Week did yet another fantastic job of filling her number bag with all sorts of things related to the number 15.  She even included a tea bag packet with instructions suggesting the tea bag be steeped for 15 minutes, coins adding up to 15 pence and a jar containing 15g of peppercorns!

Weekend Challenge: how about setting yourself some time challenges.  For example, what can you do in 1 minute? How many toys can you pick up? How far can you run? How many star jumps can you do? What other time challenges could you set yourself?

Our new number of the week has been chosen as:

Within our phonics lessons this week, we revised the digraphs ‘ai’ and ‘ee’.  We also had another look at how to form the letter ‘a’ as many of us find this quite tricky.  Remember, if you are practising this one at home, start with a curly c, go up to the top, back down and add a tail.  Don’t take your pencil off because it is not an ‘o’ with a tail.

Here the CBeebies show ‘Get Squiggling’ shows you how to do it (skip to 2:07 for the ‘a’ letter a bit):

Finally, we had a bit of a treat this week, with a special music lesson.  Here we are with Soo, our music teacher, learning a turn-taking song. We are very much looking forward to our next lesson!

Welcome back to school and the start of the summer term in Reception!  We hope everyone had a restful and enjoyable Easter break.

This week the children went on their first proper school trip – proper in the sense that it was on an actual coach!  We went to lovely Godstone Farm in Surrey where the children enjoyed a day packed full of fun activities.  A huge thank you to the mums and dads who gave up their time to come with us.

• First, we took a tractor ride across the farm.
• Then we ventured into the woods to learn how to make huge spider webs; we were shown how to wind string around large wooden frames and then we had a go ourselves.
• Next we had the chance to meet and touch a cockerel, a chick, a rabbit and an 84-year-old tortoise!
• After lunch we learnt about what happens to wool on its way from a sheep’s back to a coloured ball ready for use and we had a go at weaving.
• Finally, we watched four delightful pigs race around a ready-made track and cheered on our favourites!

Here are some photos from the day:

If you fancy challenging yourself this weekend, here are some ideas for a weekend challenge:

• Can you draw a map to show where the tractor went when it took us for a ride? Draw/write what you saw on the ride.
• Can you remember how to make your own spider web? Draw a picture of a web and write a set of instructions to explain what to do, or make your own frame out of sticks and wind string around it.
• Can you draw a picture of one of the animals we met and write a sentence about your picture?
• Can you draw a story map to show what happens to wool: start with a sheep and finish with a ball of wool – what happens in between?
• Have an obstacle race with a friend, a brother or sister or even a grown-up!  Can you write down who came 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.  Can you time the race and write down the times different people took to complete the course?

This week, we completed our Lenten Project.  Each class at St. Matthew’s completes a sponsored challenge during Lent to raise money for charity.  In Reception, our challenge is to complete the route taken by Rosie the Hen (in the story of Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins).  We complete the route five times.

The playground was set up to resemble the different parts of the story and the children were encouraged to remember both the sequence of the story as well as the meaning of the prepositions used to tell the tale (across the yard, around the pond, over the haystack, past the mill, through the fence, under the beehives).  They took their challenge very seriously and kept track of how many times they had completed the course on their tick sheets.  Well done Reception!  Now don’t forget to collect in all your sponsorship money!

One of the charities we are collecting money for is the Lunchbowl Network which provides food for the orphaned children living in Kibera in Nairobi.    We watched a video of the children in Kibera and tried hard to imagine what it might feel like to have very little food. We thought about just how lucky we are to have families, food and a school full of friends to learn with everyday.  Feeling thankful, the children each wrote a prayer to say thank you for something they appreciate having in their life.  They also printed some beautiful Easter eggs using pom poms dipped in paint.

We also found time to learn the final sound on the Phase 3 sound mat which is the digraph ‘er’ as in ‘ladder’ and ‘hammer’.  This digraph makes the same sound as ‘ur’ (which we have already learnt) but it is made up of different graphemes (letters).

To distinguish ‘er’ from ‘ur’, we decided to come up with a new action for ‘er’.  Our action is to walk our fingers upwards as if walking up a ladder.

Next term, we will be spending lots of time making sure the children feel confident with all of the phase 2 and 3 sounds.  If you have time over the Easter holidays, please spend some time going over the phase 3 sounds and actions.  Try being a digraph detective: listen out for digraphs in different words (can you say if the sound is at the beginning, in the middle or at the end?) or see if you can spot any of them in stories or on signs when you are out and about.

Our Star of the Week did a fantastic job of filling up the number bag with lots of pictures representing the number 7.  Our next number of the week has been chosen as number:

We finished the week, and the term, with our Easter Service in St. Matthew’s Church. Listening to the prayers read by some of the older children gave us all another reminder of just how thankful we are for the lives we have been blessed with.  Mother Helen led the Service and the Reception children did a super job of joining in with all of the singing.

Back in the classroom, we took a moment to say goodbye to one of our classmates who will be moving house and school during the Easter holiday.  We are very thankful for his friendship and wish him and his family all the very best in their next adventure!  A huge thank you to one of our lovely mums who organised a school T-shirt for the children to sign and present to him as a leaving gift.

The children have all worked so hard this term, made super progress and grown up so much.  We would like to thank all the parents for your continuing support and encouragement and we wish everyone a very happy and restful Easter!

We had yet another busy week in Oak Class!  This time, we were busy getting ourselves ready to celebrate Mother’s Day.  First, we read the story “My Mum” by Anthony Browne which helped us to think about all the many things that our lovely mums do for us.  We then drew some lovely pictures of our mums and wrote about how special they are to us.  Finally, we made some handprint gifts which hopefully all our mums will have received by now!  We hope all the mummies had a wonderful Mother’s Day and enjoyed the spring sunshine!

In our maths lessons, we worked on ordering numbers up to 20.  The children worked very confidently, using the large number line in the classroom to support themselves and check the correct sequence of the numbers.  We then decided to challenge ourselves a little more, by ordering numbers out of sequence (e.g. ordering 5, 8, 13 and 17).  The children worked with their ‘Walk and Talk’ partners which encouraged them to talk about the decisions they were making and use the terms ‘more than’ and ‘less than’.

If you would like to have a go at ordering numbers at home, why not try one of these caterpillar games:

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/ordering-and-sequencing/caterpillar-ordering

http://www.ictgames.com/caterpillar_slider.html

In our phonics lessons, we learnt two new sounds.  The first was the trigraph ‘air’ as in h-air and f-air.  We decided that the action for this sound would be to touch our hair.

Next we learnt a sound that is usually taught as the trigraph ‘ure’ as in, are you s-ure?  This is how the sound appears on our sound mats.

Occasionally, this sound is also taught as the quadgraph ‘ture’. (Yes, that’s right, a quadgraph!).  Within the set of video clips that we use to support the children’s learning in class, this sound is taught as ‘ture’ as in ‘adventure’.

The children were very taken with the idea of a ‘quadgraph’ and we didn’t really have time to look at the distinction carefully, so we will certainly be revisiting this sound and adding an action to it (in its trigraph form) next week.

Our number of the week was 17 and here’s what our Star of the Week found to fill up the number bag.  He was a very thorough number detective, finding the number 17 hidden on all sorts of tickets and receipts!

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

Finally, the children especially enjoyed washing the babies in the water tray this week. Many of them were very dirty it seems and needed a good scrub and hair wash! Afterwards, the babies were carefully wrapped up in towels and put down for a nap.

Many of the children have also been enjoying using the large wooden blocks in the classroom to build increasingly complex structures!  In this photo, a group had worked together to build a working ramp, complete with walls and obstacles.

And last, but not least, Miss Lizzi’s building club continues to be a weekly fixture.  Here some of the members are enjoying serving each other food in their restaurant complete with individual seats and tables.