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.

The children were introduced to some very important visitors this week; their very own mini-mes!  Mini-mes are miniature versions of the children that they can hold, move around and stand up by themselves. They are a fantastic way of encouraging the development of both communication & language skills and personal, social and emotional skills through imaginative and real-world role-play.

Naturally, they have been a great hit and many have already been taken on adventures around the classroom and out into the playground.  We are chronicling their adventures on a display in the classroom so do take a look next time you visit.  So far, a mini-me has already come face to face to with a large earthworm whilst adventuring through the undergrowth in the nursery playground!  While another needed emergency medical treatment after breaking his arm.  Luckily, he was taken straight to the doctor’s office for emergency treatment including arm bandaging!

In our phonics lessons, we learnt two new sounds.  The first was ‘k’ which makes exactly the same sound and has the same action as ‘c’, which we learnt last week.  To distinguish between the two, we refer to ‘c’ as ‘curly c’ and to ‘k’ as ‘kicking k’.

The second sound we learnt was ‘ck’ which, as you can see, is actually two letters.  Even though this sound is made up of two letters, it only makes one sound, not two.  We call these types of sounds ‘digraphs’ or ‘holding hands sounds’ and we link our thumbs together, as if holding hands, when we see them.

The sound that ‘ck’ makes is exactly the same as the sounds ‘c’ and ‘k’.  The action (pretending to play castanets) is also the same.

Weekend challenge: can you read the word duck, using your robot arms?  Can you think of any other ‘ck’ words? Can you make a list of them?

The children were also introduced to the idea of tricky words.  These are words that cannot be sounded out as they just don’t make sense when you try to do so.  For example, the tricky word ‘to’ sounds like ‘toh’ if you sound out the sounds ‘t’ and ‘o’and blend them together. So, instead of sounding out, tricky words need to be learnt on-sight as whole words.

Within phase 2 of the letters and sounds programme, there are five tricky words to learn ‘no, go, I, to, the’.

This week, we learnt the tricky words ‘go’, ‘to‘ and ‘I’.  We said ‘hey, you’re a tricky word!  You can’t trick me!’ These tricky words were lurking all around the classroom, so we searched high and low to find them and feed them to Sharky the Shark who thinks tricky words are delicious!  Lots of words can be sounded out and it is really important at this stage that the children understand the difference.  Here are some words that can be sounded out and use all the sounds we have learnt so far.

sat, pat, tap, sap, as

it, is, sit, sat, pit, tip, pip, sip

an, in, nip, pan, pin, tin, tan, nap

am, man, mam, mat, map, Pam, Tim, Sam

dad, and, sad, dim, dip, din, did, Sid

tag, gag, gig, gap, nag, sag, gas, pig, dig

got, on, not, pot, top, dog, pop, God, Mog

can, cot, cop, cap, cat, cod

kid, kit, Kim, Ken

Weekend challenge: How many of these words can you read? Don’t forget to use your robot arms!  Perhaps you could write some too?

In our maths lessons this week we have been practising our counting and reasoning skills. We played a game of beanbag toss alongside a partner and then counted to see how many beanbags we had tossed into our hoop and how many we had tossed outside of our hoop.  We also compared our numbers with our partner’s hoop.  When we are thinking about numbers, we always try to explain how we know our answer to be true.

To support the children’s understanding of how number is represented in both written form and by quantity, we have introduced a ‘number of the week’.  Each week, the child who has been our star of the week will be given the challenge of filling up a number bag with objects/photos/pictures of the number of the week.  This week, our star did a fantastic job of filling up his bag with all sorts of things to do with the number 6 and he presented the contents of his bag to the class.  Well done!

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

Welcome back to the second half of the Autumn Term!  We hope everyone had an enjoyable and restful half term break.  The children have jumped straight back into lots of very busy playing, exploring and learning.

This week we have been talking about Bonfire Night and how to keep ourselves safe around bonfires and fireworks.  Here are some of the important safety rules we talked about:

We also used our ‘listening ears’ and our ‘looking eyes’ to think about the sounds and sights created by fireworks in the night sky.  We made some fantastic firework pictures using shiny paint and interesting tools (i.e. the tips of cotton buds and the ends of toilet rolls).

Afterwards, we created silhouettes to add to our firework pictures.  This was a great opportunity to practise using prepositions and the names of 2D shapes correctly as we selected and placed the shapes along a piece of black card.  We then drew a line along the top of the shapes and carefully cut along the line to create the effect of a silhouette of buildings.

And here are our completed pictures!  Well done Reception, you can almost hear the fireworks “popping” and “booming” into the night sky!

Weekend challenge: Have a go at practising using prepositions correctly.   Use a favourite teddy or toy and take it on an adventure around your home or bedroom.  Try putting it under, above, next to, in, on, behind, in front of and in between something.  Perhaps you could even take some photos of your teddy’s travels and write some labels or captions to go with the photos showing each time exactly where your teddy is in relation to the objects around it.  Bon voyage!

In our phonics lessons this week, we learnt three new sounds: ‘g’, ‘o’ and ‘c’.  Here are the actions and mouth shapes for each of these sounds.

We also started some very special music lessons this week!  One of our St. Matthew’s mums, who many of you will already know, came to work with the children to develop their understanding and sense of musicality.  The children loved their first session and we are so delighted that Leilani will be coming back every week to work with the class.

Finally, we welcomed a new classmate in Reception this week.  As we do not post children’s names on our blog, please do take a moment to ask your child the name of the new boy.  I am sure you will all join me in wishing him and his family a very warm welcome to Oak Class and St. Matthew’s.