Happy weekend to all Reception Oak Class families.  This week we have combined our weather topic with kites and flags and this weeks weather has lived up to expectation with a variety of sun, rain and wind to get our kites flying and our flags billowing!

Everyone in Reception has made their own kite with Mrs Mooney and then gone on to do a similar task independently. This week has seen the children ‘ flying’  around the playground, their kites bobbing along behind their shrieks of delight! It’s been a very happy week!

 

 

 

We are now concentrating on nearly all independent writing, rather than one on one or a small group work. The children know what they need to do and how to do it, we are currently working on confidence !

We have been learning a few songs this week, including ‘ Let’s go fly a kite’ from the musical Mary Poppins. The children have enjoyed learning and singing along. Here is the original version if they would like to sing along at home too:

We have looked at flags, their meanings and uses. We are making semaphore flags and learning how to signal to our friends! Great fun signalling across the playground and trying to decode the messages!

 

We have watched the following video showing flags from around the world. It has been lovely to see and hear the children spot flags from countries they know family are from or even flags from some of their holiday destinations. We have had a colouring station to colour world flags too which has been very popular. We have had a dance and joined in the chorus of ‘ Wavin’ Flag’ by K’NAAN. We have some great movers in Reception and equally some that will prefer to be at the bar than on the dance floor once they get to night clubs!!

 

Our directed number work was tricky this week: the main objective was :  I Can Add More. This is from any given number. The children are good at number bonds and great counting from 0 or 1 but counting on and adding more from any given number has not proved easy! We will continue the objective alongside our new objectives next week.

Our math’s activities in the classroom for choosing time have included:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading and writing continues to be daily practice – the children have been practising perceptual reading on our interactive board where they follow a recorded prompt for trickier words and the speed of the reading matches the child doing the reading, along with partner reading, which everyone enjoyed. We had some super reading partners that really helped and encouraged each other. After any piece of independent writing not only do we expect the children to have decided on their sentence/s, counted the words they need to write, segmented each word remembering and writing the sounds needed, in a phonetically plausible order, ensuring finger spaces between each word… but also – and this has proved particularly tricky – to be able to read back what they have written. We still needs lots of practice on this! A lot of our sound and phonics work depends on the children being able to hear well and speak clearly. One thing that has really stood out this week during our writing are misunderstandings of sounds needed because of mis-hearing or not speaking clearly. Too many children have either written ‘d’  or ‘v’ instead of ‘ the’ this week! If you are able,  please do two things – when you are reading to your child follow the line with your finger so they can see where you are and how to read along line by line, ask them to spot a key word as you read, like ‘ the’ – it will really help with these misconceptions. Also if you can hear they are not quite pronouncing a particular sound such as ‘ th’ clearly please model this for them. These little re-iterations will really help improve reading, writing and speaking.

Have a super weekend!

Erin Bibby