A very warm welcome to the very first blog post of the new school year.  It’s hard to believe that we are already 4 weeks into the new term and what a busy 4 weeks it has been!

We are incredibly proud of how well the children have settled into their new classroom and, for many, their new school.  We have all been busy getting used to the routine, exploring the indoor and outdoor classrooms and making friends.  We even joined the rest of the school for our first whole school assembly earlier today!

In particular, the children have been getting used to sitting on the carpet and demonstrating their speaking, listening and understanding skills.  Last week, our spotlight stories focused on the wonderful Julia Donaldson series of ‘What the Ladybird Heard’.  These stories helped us to think about the key listening skills (known as Phase 1 phonics) that we will need to use when we start our phonics lessons next week.

Images from amazon.co.uk

Have a look on YouTube if you would like to revisit any of these.  This recording shows the pages one by one, so you could turn off the sound and read the story yourself if you would like to:

This week, our Spotlight Stories helped us to think about special things and how we might feel if we lost them.  We especially enjoyed the stories of Dogger by Shirley Hughes and Where Are You Blue Kangaroo by Emma Chichester Clark.

Images from amazon.co.uk

You can revisit these here:

We also read the story of Ruby’s Worry by Tom Percival which helped us to think about how we might feel if we lost something special.  We learnt a new word – anxious – which is another word for worry.

We have made a class book of our special things which we will keep in our prayer corner so we can share these photos with each other whenever we like.

Have a lovely weekend everyone and see you on Monday!

To all our wonderful parents and carers,

It is difficult to find the words to thank you sufficiently for your incredible generosity with our end of year gifts as well as your fantastic support throughout the year.

Personally, I have been so touched by all your warm wishes and encouragement throughout the year but particularly over the past few months.  Thank you for all the lovely cards and messages which have meant so much to me.

We couldn’t be prouder of your amazing children who have each grown and flourished in their Reception year.  We will be watching closely as they set off into Year 1 and will be keeping a soft spot in our hearts for each and everyone of them.

Have a wonderful summer everyone!

Miss Cronin and the rest of the Reception team.

P.S. Please remember to logon to Seesaw and download a zip file of your child’s photographs before the beginning of September when the class files will be archived.

Please note that all photographs downloaded must be for your own personal use only – they must NOT be re-posted on any social media site if they contain images of other children – as we do not have parental permission for all the children in our class to be on the internet.  Thank you in advance for your understanding and for taking great care with this.  

Here’s how to download a .zip archive of your child’s Seesaw journal, including images, videos, audio recordings, and text notes or captions.

Please use a computer and a Chrome or Firefox browser only, the .zip file will not download on a mobile or tablet device.

1. Sign into your Family account at https://app.seesaw.me.

2. Click your Profile Icon on the top left.

3. Click the Gear Icon.

4. Click Account Settings.

5. Scroll down and click Download Journal Archives.

6. Click the Download Journal button for the journal you want to download. This might take awhile depending on your Internet speed and how many posts your child has in Seesaw.

This is what you get! It is organized by month and then ordered by the date the post was added. You’ll see an html file with a thumbnail, text notes or captions, folder names and links (if the post used the Link content creation tool). You’ll also see the original image, video or audio files.

This week, the children had two very special visitors – Henrietta the Hen & Farmer Alice from Deen City Farm.  They came to entrust the children with an important job – the care of 10 chick eggs which are now safely tucked up in an incubator in the classroom!  Over the next three weeks, the children will ensure the eggs stay safe and warm as the chicks begin to grow and (hopefully!) hatch on day 21 of their incubation!

In other (far less exciting!) news, the children also learnt the trigraphs ‘ear’ and ‘air’:

Welcome back to the summer term in Reception.   We hope everyone had a restful Easter break.  It is hard to believe we are already into the final term of the Reception year!  We have lots of exciting activities planned for the term ahead and we look forward to sharing these with the children. What a beautifully sunny start we have had – let’s hope there is more of this lovely weather to come!

Our topic this term will be ‘Ticket to Ride’ and for the next few weeks we will be focusing on heading ‘down to the farm’.  We will be reading lots of farmyard stories in preparation for our trip to Godstone Farm the week after next.

This week we read the story of ‘Oww!’ which tells the tale of poor Piggy Piglet who manages to get a thistle stuck to his bottom!  He asks all of his farmyard friends to help him solve his prickly problem.  The story uses many of the sounds (including digraphs) that we have learnt so far, particularly when the animals are speaking (e.g. m-oo, w-oo-f, oi-n-k, ow-ee,  b-a-a, k-i-ck), so it’s a super story to have a go at re-reading yourself.

You can listen to the story and read it again here:

Naturally, we learnt the ‘ow’ diagraph this week as it links so nicely with Piggy Piglet’s story. Here’s the action, mouth shape and picture prompt for this digraph:

Please note, the action for ‘ow’ is the same as the Jolly Phonics action for ‘ou’:

Weekend Challenge: how many of these ‘ow’ words can you read? Remember to use your robot arms when you sound out the sounds.  How many of these ‘ow’ words can you write? Remember to use your phoneme fingers when you spell out the words.  Can you think of anymore ‘ow’ words?

The second digraph we learnt this week was ‘oi’.  We read the story ‘Oi Frog!’ to introduce us to this new sound.  We very much enjoyed the silly rhymes in this story and, it too, is well worth a re-read.

You can watch and re-read the story here:

Here is the action, mouth shape and picture prompt for the digraph ‘oi’:

In our maths lessons, we learnt about solid, 3D shapes.  We had a go a sorting some 2D and 3D shapes (by doing the squishing test!) to make sure we understood the difference between flat 2D shapes and fat (or solid) 3D shapes.  We then learnt the names of these seven 3D shapes (please note, we learnt the name ‘triangular prism’ rather than just prism!).

We then started to have a think about where we might find these shapes in the world around us:

Weekend Challenge: have a look around your home – can you find something that is the same shape as a sphere, cube, cuboid, cone, pyramid and cylinder.  Don’t forget to find something that is the same shape as a triangular prism too!  Take some photos of the things you find or draw some pictures and bring them in to show the class!

Finally, our Star of the Week did a fantastic job of presenting her number bag for the number 10:

If you are looking for more maths or literacy games to support your child’s learning at home, have a look at:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/3-5-years/counting

and these:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/english-games/3-5-years/letters-and-sounds

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/phase-3-games.html

This week, we read the story of A Chair for Baby Bear.  It’s such an enjoyable story and tells the tale of Baby Bear’s search for a new chair after Goldilocks has been to visit.

You can hear the story being retold in this CBeebies clip:

The children were then challenged to design their very own chairs for baby bear and to make their designs using junk materials.  They had to think carefully about the shapes of the different materials they used, considering both stability and comfort.

Here are the finished products – quite impressive I’m sure you’ll agree!  Several of our mini-mes also enjoyed trying out the various chairs which led to lots of imaginative make-believe play!

In our maths lessons this week, we have been linking our whole school theme of fairness to our number work.  In other words, we have been thinking about how to make things fair when sharing out equally.

Weekend challenge: How many different ways can you share out 10 sweets between 2 people? Draw a picture or some number sentences to show the different ways. How many of the ways are fair? Can you find a way to share out 10 sweets between 3 people – try and make it fair, does it work? Why not?

In our phonics lessons this week we learnt the digraph ‘oo’ which makes two sounds; sometimes a short sound and sometimes a long one.  The trouble is, you can’t tell which sound it’s making just by looking at it. You have to try both and see which one sounds best and makes sense within the word.  For example, it makes a long sound in the word m-oo-n but a short sound in the word b-oo-k. Here is the action to help us remember ‘oo’ and distinguish between the two versions:

Here is the mouth shape for the long ‘oo’ sound:

And the short ‘oo’ sound:

And here are the picture prompts we used for our sentence writing:

One of our previous Stars of the Week did a fantastic job of presenting his 16 number bag:

Our new number of the week was chosen as number:

Finally, one of the carpet sessions we enjoy most weeks is based around the CBeebies series ‘Get Squiggling’.  The children use their listening and understanding skills to follow a series of instructions to complete a drawing on their whiteboards.  They are encouraged to think carefully about the different sorts of lines they use (e.g. straight, curved, zigzag) to complete their drawings and to add extra details if they wish.  This week, the children were challenged to draw a pirate picture and all did a fantastic job of course!

Our whole-school theme this half term is justice and, in Reception, we have been thinking about how we can work together to make things fair.  One of the ways in which we try to keep things fair is by using the sand-timer to take equal turns on the bikes or on the classroom computer.  We also know how to use the number mats to order ourselves when we are waiting for our turn on the Interactive Whiteboard.  Well done Reception!   

As you can probably imagine, reading the story of Goldilocks has prompted lots of conversations about fairness, as well as ways in which we can all be more thoughtful and, most importantly, try to make things better when things do go wrong.  We all agreed that one of the ways in which Goldilocks could have made things better would have been to say sorry to the Three Bears.

We read a different sort of Goldilocks story this week – A Bad Week for the Three Bears – which is actually a prequel to the traditional tale.  In the story, we discover that the poor, old three bears have actually had quite a rough week even before Goldilocks visits and creates such chaos.

We also took turns taking on the roles of Goldilocks and Baby Bear! We have some amazing actors in our class who were able to convey how these characters were feeling through both their facial expressions and their own choice of words in role (e.g. baby bear ended up inviting Goldilocks for a playdate!).

In our phonics lessons this week, we learnt 2 new digraphs; ‘oa’ and ‘ar’

The sound for the digraph ‘oa’ is the same as the letter name ‘o’ and can be found in words such as ‘goat’ and ‘boat’.  Here is the mouth shape, action and picture prompt for ‘oa’:

We also learnt the digraph ‘ar’ as in c-ar and f-ar.  Here is the action, mouth shape and picture prompt for this digraph:

We had a bit of a catch up this week, we two of our previous Stars of the Week presenting their fantastic number bags for numbers 17 and 19 to the class:

Our new number of the week was chosen as number:

What a beautifully snowy week it was!  We loved getting out and about in the snow and felt so lucky to have so much open space in our lovely school which gave us all the chance to experience that lovely crunchy sound you hear when walking on freshly-fallen snow!

On Thursday, Miss Cronin, Mrs Mooney and Mrs Morris couldn’t get to school because of the snow, but fortunately Goldilocks, Mummy Bear and Daddy Bear turned up instead and read lots of stories to the class! 😉

Baby bear turned up in the afternoon!

A huge thank you to all the parents and carers for supplying such fantastic costumes for the children on World Book Day.  We had a whole school assembly in the afternoon where we paraded our costumes and watched the rest of the school parade theirs.

In other news…

We learnt one new sound this week: a new sort of sound known as a trigraph.  It’s a bit like a digraph (where two letters sit together making one sound) but in this case three letters sit together making just one sound.

The trigraph we learnt is ‘igh’, as in ‘high’.  Although the word high is made up of 4 letters, it is only made up of 2 sounds, i.e. h-igh.  We decided that the action for ‘igh’ would be holding three fingers up high.

In our maths lessons this week we have been thinking about making repeating patterns.  We used lego pieces to make pattern towers such as ‘red, blue, red, blue, red, blue’ which we call an AB pattern.  We also had a go at making an AABB pattern, e.g. red, red, blue, blue, red, red, blue, blue.

Weekend challenge: Make a pattern using objects you have at home (e.g. spoons and forks, teddy bears and cars, cups and bowls, etc.).  Can you use these objects to make an AB pattern? Now try making an AABB pattern.  If that was too easy, find another set of objects to add to your pattern – try making an ABC pattern, an AABBCC pattern or even an AAABBBCCC pattern! Are there any other patterns you can make?

Finally, our new number of the week has been chosen as number:

Welcome back to the second half of the Spring Term.  We hope everyone had a lovely half term break.  It seems so hard to believe that we are now halfway through the Reception year!

Before the half term holiday, we took a break from our ‘Once Upon a Time’ topic to learn about Chinese New Year (which took place during the half term week on Friday 16th February).  We learnt about the story of the zodiac which explains how the 12 years of the zodiac cycle were named after the 12 different animals in a race.  The Jade Emperor decided that whichever animal won the race would have the first year named after it.  The second animal to cross the finish line would have the second year named after it, then the third, fourth, fifth and so on.  We all thought the rat was very sneaky.  Can you remember why?

You can watch a clip of the story here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories/lets-celebrate-chinesenewyearperformance

Weekend challenge: Have a look at the zodiac picture above.  Can you use the words first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth to talk about the picture and the story of the zodiac.  Find out which year you were born in and use the zodiac picture to find out which animal year you were born in. Write it down in a sentence (e.g. I was born in the year of the …). Can you find out when some of the people in your family were born?  This chart will help you find out about the grown-ups in your home:

In our phonics lessons, we have learnt 4 more sounds since the last blog post (two before the half term break and two this week).  Here are the mouth shapes, actions and picture prompts for the digraphs ‘th’, ‘ng’, ‘ai’ and ‘ee’.

There are actually two versions of the ‘th’ sound: a ‘voiced’ one and an ‘unvoiced’ one.  If you say the words ‘thin’ and ‘that’, you should notice the rather subtle difference (i.e. air being blown out or not).

In class, we talked about this sound being a little bit rude, in that you need to stick your tongue out – just a tiny bit when saying words like that, the and this – and a little bit further when saying words like thin, Thursday and thumb.

At this point, we would just like the children to be recognising this digraph as the one where they stick their tongue out and we are not too concerned about them hearing the difference between these two versions.  If you would like to explore the difference with them, however, please do so!

Here’s another way of explaining it!

Instead of the jolly phonics action, we decided to say the voiced sound ‘th’ and show a thumbs up.

The diagraph ‘ng’ is the sound you can here at the end of words such a ‘ring’ and ‘king’.  Please note I’ve included a sound clip for ‘ng’ this time, as I couldn’t find an example of the mouth shape!)

The diagraph ‘ai’ sounds like the name of the letter ‘a’ – prounounced ‘ay’.

This week, we read the fantastic story of ‘Grandpa’s magic slippers’ and we thought about what our own magic slippers or shoes might look like!

We looked at some weird and wonderful shoe designs, including some by Andy Warhol (see below) and those in a great little book by Linda O’Keeffe.  We had a go at drawing our own magic shoes and we will be continuing to work on these next week.

Please note, not all of the shoes we looked at for inspiration were high-heeled shoes aimed at women! We ensured, as always, that we also showed the children shoes that were gender-free and some that challenged their gender assumptions!

Finally, we have two number bags to catch up on for the numbers 15 and 14.  As always, our stars of the week did a fantastic job of filling up their numbers bags and presenting the contents to the class!

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

As we all know, Once Upon A Time stories are packed full of Princesses dancing with Princes and living happily ever! This week, we wanted to know how this influences the children ideas, so we asked them to share their thoughts about what Princesses are and, specifically, what they think Princesses wear and do.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, many said they wear dresses and tiaras and dance at fancy balls!

We decided to show the children some photos of real-life Princesses (i.e. Diana and the Duchess of Cambridge) to challenge their ideas about what Princesses look like and to introduce them to the idea that there is often a distinction between story-book characters and people in real-life.  We also wanted them to pick up on the idea that real-life Princesses do a lot of humanitarian work (when they are not busy dancing, of course!).  I’m not sure they were entirely convinced that these women, dressed in trousers and tracksuit bottoms, were Princesses!  But they were certainly intrigued by the idea, particularly by the photo of Princess Diana walking alongside the dangerous landmine signs.

We then read the story “Not All Princesses Dress in Pink” which encouraged the children to think about Princesses as children like them who can do anything they set out to do (e.g. build forts, play in the mud, etc.) – very much like the girls (and boys) in our class.

The children were quite inspired by this challenge to their assumptions and created their own fantastic word display in our outdoor classroom…

Speaking of our outdoor classroom, we immersed the children in our Cinderella theme this week, with several ‘invitations to play’ in our outdoor area:

We also found time to read the story of Prince Cinders, which is another Cinderella story, only this time with a male lead!  It is written by the wonderful author Babette Cole and is certainly worth a re-read if you come across it.

In our phonics lessons, we learnt the digraphs ‘ch’ and ‘sh’.  Here are the actions, mouth shapes and picture prompts.

Our star of the week did a fantastic job of filling her number bag up with all things to do with the number 13.

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

Finallly, we just wanted to say a huge thank you to all our wonderful parents and carers for your extra support this week when we had our special visitors in school.  Your kinds words and encouragement meant an awful lot, thank you!

This week we read the story of ‘Cendrillon’ which is another version of the classic Cinderella fairytale.  I didn’t tell the children that it was a Cinderella story but it didn’t take them long to figure it out!  “It’s like Cinderella”! many of them said, and we were able to talk about the similarities and differences between the two stories.

‘Cendrillon’ is actually the French word for Cinderella and was one of the earliest European versions of the story to be published by Charles Perrault in 1697!  He is famous for having used old folktales to write the sort of stories that we now call fairytales!

Our own investigation into the mystery footprint has continued with much excitement, with several people on our list now having had their footprints measured. We will finish off collecting the remaining footprints next week and we should then be able to work out who the mystery footprint belongs to!

In our phonics lessons, we have been working hard to make sure we are confident when it comes to recognising digraphs ( when two letters sit together making just one sound).

Weekend challenge: Have a look at your sound-mat…can you spot all the digraphs?  Can you write a list of words with these digraphs in them? Ask a grown-up to think of the words and then see if you can sound them out and write them!

We learnt two new digraphs this week: ‘zz’ and ‘qu’.

We have started using picture prompts in our phonics lessons to help the children put the sounds they are learning into meaningful contexts and to support them when using the sounds in their writing.  I’ll try to remember to post the prompts here alongside the actions and mouth shapes for each new sound as you might find it useful to link the picture and sound with your child at home.

Please note the action and mouth shape for ‘zz’ are the same as those for ‘z’:

In our maths lessons we have continued to enjoy lots more estimating and measuring…

And our star of the week did a fantastic job of filling her number bag with all sorts of things to do with the number 11, including an amazing homemade numbered necklace!

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

We have also been enjoying lots of lovely messy play in our creative area – here the children were busy making numerals out of sand and glue!

And during a particularly rainy day this week, we put a rainforest scene complete with gentle waterfall sound effects up on the whiteboard – the children were delighted by this and responded by setting themselves us “like a movie-night!” with rows of chairs and clipboards!