It has been a busy couple of weeks in Reception with rehearsals for the Christmas show now in full swing! We are very much looking forward to performing for you and we hope everyone has now received their tickets. Despite being busy with rehearsals, we have still found plenty of time for lots of wonderful learning through play both indoors and outside. In particular, there has been lots of work on our construction sites resulting in some rather impressive creations – you might even recognise one or two of these!
We have especially loved playing with the marble run this week and it has encouraged us all to work together and listen carefully to each other’s ideas. Listening to each other is not always easy but, thankfully, we are all so kind and friendly in Reception, that we understand how important it is to do this. We now have a kindness tree in our prayer corner and whenever someone is kind to us, we can add a leaf onto the tree for them. We already have several leaves on our tree of course!
Our kindness tree isn’t the only place in the classroom where green leaves have been appearing! It has been with great excitement that we have watched our beanstalks start to grow, with tiny shoots peeping up through the soil at first, followed by long green stalks and lots of leaves. We used a ruler to measure them and some of them are already 15cm tall! More photos to follow…
Our growing beanstalks inspired some of our maths work: we ordered numbered beanstalks and then added the correct number of leaves to each. We had to do lots of careful counting and checking, being sure to stop at the ‘stopping number’ each time. Peeling the sticker leaves off the sheet was also great practise for our fine motor skills!
We also worked with our carpet partners to match numerals to quantities on our fingers and asked questions such as, what is the quickest way to show 5? Show me 4 – can you show me another way to show me 4? Use your fingers to show me 2! Remember, do not count, show me the amount!
We have also been developing our understanding of the concepts of ‘more than’ and ‘fewer than’ with a little help from Stanley and Gruffy (our class puppets) who can often be found arguing over the sweetie jar!
In our phonics lessons, we have been busy learning more of the set 1 sounds. We now know all of these sounds:
The sounds g, o, c, k, u and b are all bouncy sounds. The picture prompts help us to remember both the sounds that these letters make and how to write them.
And we have been practising our Fred-talk; blending and segmenting the sounds in CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. We have been listening carefully for the initial, middle and final sounds.
We hope everyone is having a lovely weekend, see you on Monday!