On Thursday morning, when I arrived at school, I discovered a muddy footprint just outside the classroom door.  It had not been there when I had left school the previous evening and I wondered who on earth it might belong to.  Knowing that the Reception children are such super problem-solvers, I decided to draw the outline of the footprint onto a piece of paper to show the children.  When they arrived in the classroom, I explained what I had found and they all agreed…it was a bit of a mystery!

The first thought the children had was that the footprint might have been left by a “stranger”, “a robber” or “a bad guy”.  However, after much discussion, this idea was firmly ruled out as we all agreed our school is a very safe place.  As one child explained; “the door is locked and you have to go to the office”.  I explained to the children that strangers do not come into our school unless they have come to visit us.  Visitors always wear a red lanyard around their necks (instead of the blue ones which teachers wear) which means Mrs Saunders or Mrs Morgan has said they can come in.

Since we knew the footprint must belong to someone in school, we decided to make a list of possible people.  Here is our list:

1. Miss Cronin
2. Mr Norris (our caretaker)
3. Mrs Warner (our deputy head)
4. A year 1 child
5. A year 6 child
6. Mrs Mooney
7. Mrs Rainey (our year 2 teacher)
8. Miss Leutchford (our year 1 teacher)

Next, we wondered how we could find out which person on our list had left the footprint.  The children quickly suggested we would need to get the footprints of the people on the list and then check to see which one matches our footprint!  “If it is the same then we know it is his!”

We made a start on our footprint investigation by drawing around our very own Mrs Mooney’s foot…but discovered her footprint was actually too small!  Next week, we will be taking the measurements of the other people on the list to try and solve our very own Cinderella mystery!  Watch this space…

The children were very taken with idea of measuring their own feet and several set off during choosing time to do so!  We also used the unifix cubes to have a go at estimating how long they thought their foot might be and then measuring it to find out if they were right.

Weekend Challenge: Measure around the feet or shoes of the people in your family.  Can you put them in order from smallest to biggest?  Now do some measuring; you can use anything you can find at home as long as it is the same size, e.g. bottle tops, cars, lego pieces or you could have a go at measuring with a ruler or a measuring tape.  Don’t forget to estimate (make a guess) first and then find out how close you were.  Write a list of the people you are going to measure, then write down your estimate for how long you think their foot will be, then write down the actual measurement.

Of course, it seemed only ‘fitting’ that we also read the story of Cinderella this week.  We read a version called “Cinderella and her very bossy sisters” which can be found in Raynes Park library.  It is a modern version of the classic fairytale.

Weekend Challenge: Can you remember the story of Cinderella? Can you re-tell the story to someone in your family? Don’t forget to start with “Once Upon a Time…” What happens in the end? Could you make up a different ending?

During our phonics lessons this week, we learnt the final 3 sounds of the alphabet ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’.  Please note, we decided not to use the jolly phonics action for ‘x’ (where you pretend to take an x-ray photo) as it can be confusing for the children that x uses it’s name at the start of words like x-ray, but uses its sound (ks) at the end of words like f-o-x.  Instead, we came up with our own action which is to cross our arms to make the shape of the letter.

Our Star of the Week did a fantastic job of filling up his number bag with all things to do with the number 3:

And our new number of the week was chosen as number 11:

Dear Parents and Carers,

Please look out for this letter coming home in book bags from this week…

letter to parents about reading books

Many thanks,

Miss C.

A very happy new year to everyone and welcome back to school!  The children certainly seem to have come back having had a super break, feeling rested and ready to launch themselves back into lots of busy playing and learning.

This term our topic will be ‘Once Upon a Time’.  We will be immersing ourselves in the wonderful world of fairytales and reading lots of well-known stories.  This week, we started to have a think about some of the key features of fairytales, i.e. the sort of characters and settings we might expect to find in these types of books.

We all agreed we might well find a princess or two, perhaps a prince, a dragon and most likely, a big bad wolf! To challenge the children’s assumptions about what might happen to these characters we read two (less well-known) stories that contain rather unexpected twists!  Both are well-worth a re-read if you happen to come across them (the first can be found in Raynes Park Library and we have copies of the second in school).

As the children have now learnt all the phase 2 sounds, we moved on this week into phase 3 of the Letters & Sounds programme that we follow.

At this point, please take a moment to sit down with your child and have a look over the phase 2 sound mat (that we gave you at parents evening).  Your child should now feel confident recognising all of these sounds.

The first sound in phase 3 is j…which is for jelly of course!

“Wibble wobble wibble wobble jelly on a plate!”

We couldn’t resist the opportunity to make (and of course eat!) some jelly of our own.

Weekend challenge: Can you remember how we made our jelly? Can you write a list of the things we needed to make our jelly?

1.Break up the jelly cubes (“they are squidgy!”)

2.Pour in boiling hot water (“be careful, it is very hot!”)

3.Mix carefully (“the water is turning orange!”)

4.Add cold water and mix again (“it is not hot anymore”)

5.Put in the fridge (“we need to make it like jelly again!”)

6.Eat your jelly (“it’s yummy!”)

Here are the actions and mouth shapes for ‘j’ and the two other sounds we learnt this week (‘v’ and ‘w’).

We have also started learning the tricky words for phase 3.  This week we learnt ‘he‘ and ‘she‘.  We will be adding more tricky words to your child’s word pots over the coming weeks, so please continue to return the pots in your book bag each week, thank you!

Our Star of the Week did a fantastic job of filling up his number bag with all things to do with the number 12; we had an egg box, two toy train carriages with 6 windows on each, a shopping receipt showing £12 and a ruler showing 12cm!

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

Weekend Challenge:  Challenge someone in your family to a number battle! Can you explain what they have to do, just like we do in school? Here are some tricky number battles for you to try…can you find the next two numbers to start off these number battles?

4,5,_,_

9,8,_,_

15,14,_,_

2,4,_,_

10,8, _,_

Now have a go at thinking of your own two numbers to start off a number battle!

Finally, you might be interested to know that every Friday afternoon, it is Reception’s turn to visit our ICT suite in school.  The class is divided into three groups (i.e. each child visits once every three weeks) so that we can give the children more individualised support.  The children have been working very hard to practise using their mouse skills; moving it around, noticing when the arrow changes into a hand and clicking in the right place on the mouse!

It has been a rather special week in Reception with both the Christmas shows and Christmas party taking place.  A huge thank you to all the parents and carers for giving us so much support by providing costumes, coming along to be our audiences and sending in treats for the party!

Here are some photos from our busy Christmas week:

This week we read the classic story of ‘The Jolly Postman’ about a postman who delivers cards and letters to the characters from several well-known fairy tales.  It is a delightful story made even more enjoyable by the fact that you can actually pull the letters and postcards out of envelopes throughout the story. It is well worth a re-read (and there is also a Christmas version!).  We are now working on writing our own sorts of letters which we will tell you more about next week, so watch this space…

In our phonics lessons, we learnt two new sounds; ‘h’ and ‘b’.  Here are the actions and mouth shapes for these sounds.  

In our maths lessons this week, we have been finding out about the concept of weight (i.e. objects that are “heavier” and “lighter”).  This is not an easy concept to understand and many of the children confuse it with size (i.e. things being “bigger” and “smaller”).  For example, they may hold the misconception that if something is smaller it will be lighter.

To challenge their ideas, we used the bucket scales to weigh two identical plastic boxes.  To our surprise, one of the boxes made the bucket tip down.  After some careful consideration, the children realised that there must be something “heavy” inside this box and, indeed, when we opened it we discovered it was full of coins while the other box contained a single feather!

The children have really been enjoying using the bucket scales to weigh all sorts of things in the classroom.  They have been coming up with their own ideas about what to weigh, making their own predictions (e.g. I think it will be lighter because…), weighing the objects and even recording their findings.  What a lot of budding scientists we have in Reception!

Weekend challenge: look around your home, can you find something that is big but light?  How about something that is small but heavy?  Why do you think these objects are light and/or heavy?

We also have some special visitors in our classroom at the moment!  Despite the cold weather, Miss Cronin managed to find some earthworms in her garden and we decided to make a worm hotel together so that we could take a closer peek at the life of a worm.  In this photo, I had just told the children what we would be making and, as you can see, they were quite taken with the idea!

We followed the instructions in the wormery box very carefully and everyone had a turn (if they wanted to!) to add some soil, sand or a worm to the hotel.  We are all quite convinced that the biggest worm we added is, of course, the real Superworm!

After we had made our worm hotel, we got to work writing lots of signs to let everyone know what it is and that they must not touch it or speak too loudly when they are nearby!

Finally, our Star of the Week did yet another fantastic job of filling his number bag up with all things to do with the number 7.  Here he is presenting his bag to the class:

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

Tricky word pots have now started to come home in your child’s book bag.

Please look out for them and use them to support your child’s learning at home.

Here is a copy of the handout (that you’ll find in the book bag) which explains more about the pots and what to do with them: word-pots

Many thanks!

The excitement is really starting to build across the lower part of the school as we have now begun our Christmas show rehearsals in earnest!  Next week, you will receive more information about the show along with details of your child’s role.  Please look out for these letters as we will be asking you to supply a simple costume.  Do talk to us if you need any help putting the costume together – as we have lots of spare dressing up clothes in school.

Of course, we also found time to continue our learning through lots of play! We read the book ‘Yucky Worms’ by Vivian French which is both a fiction and non-fiction text.  We learnt some incredible facts about earthworms; did you know earthworms have 5 hearts!

Here’s a youtube clip of the story being read aloud if you would like to revisit the book:

As the weather has started to get much colder this week, we have not found any earthworms as they are likely to be sleeping deep down in their burrows.  But incredibly, look what we were able to find!

Some of the children even made special binoculars to help them in their outdoor searches and imaginative play…

In our phonics lessons this week, we learnt the sound ‘r’.  Here’s the mouth shape and action for this sound:

And our star of the week did a super job of filling up her number bag with all things related to the number 8.  Here she is presenting her number bag to the class.

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

Many thanks to everyone who came along to the parent evening meetings this week.  We hope you found your meeting useful and enjoyed getting more of an idea of what your child gets up to during the school day!

This week we ‘took a peek’ outside into the animal world by reading the fantastic story of Superworm.  This is one of Julia Donaldson’s many wonderful stories and is about a rather special worm who always helps his friends out of sticky situations by using his body in clever ways!

The children were rather taken with the story and many of them chose to recreate Superworm’s adventures at the playdough table.  Here he is using his body as a train:

Some chose to invent their own new ways in which Superworm might use his body, perhaps as a fancy table or even a prison!

Our enthusiasm for Superworm spilled over into our maths lesson too, when we had a go at ordering three Superworms by their different lengths.  The children knew just what to do to put them in the right order and they were able to use words such as ‘longer than’, ‘shorter than’, ‘longest’ and ‘shortest’ to explain what they had done.  Well done Reception!

Weekend Challenge: Can you find three objects as home to put in order by size, perhaps 3 teddies or 3 spoons.  How about finding a pair of shoes that belong to each person in your family and organising them by size from shortest to longest.  Don’t forget to take a photo of your ordering and send it in or bring it into school!

The children always enjoy playing with the wooden blocks both inside and outside and, this week, the blocks were used to build several towers of different heights and walkways of different lengths.  Some incredible tower designs were also constructed inside with the smaller wooden blocks!

Of course, we also spent lots of time outside, searching for the real Superworm.  I wonder if we found him?

The number of the week was 4 and our star of the week did a fantastic job of filling up his number bag with all things to do with the number 4.  Here’s what he brought in to show the class:

Our new number of the week has been chosen as the number 8:

And finally, in our phonics lessons this week, we learnt two new sounds; ‘e’ and ‘u’.  Here are the actions and mouth shapes for both:

It is very easy to muddle up the vowel sounds, especially e and i.  Try to remember e is for e-lephant, while i is for i-gloo.