We are all here! Everyone has now started in Reception and we are really proud of each and every one of them.  They have come in willing and ready and tackled each day with gusto and enthusiasm!

It’s been a second busy week settling in and getting started on our reading, writing and numbers!

This term’s topic is called ‘ TAKE A PEEK ‘ We are starting by taking a good look at ourselves…

We have made a birthday wall – showing when our birthdays are in the year…

All the children have managed circle times with our soft toys – Monday Monkey, Tuesday Ted, Wednesday Womble, Thursday Thread Bear and Friday Frog.

 This week has seen the children have a close look at their eyes in a mirror and have a go at drawing them and finding the correct colour for their eyes. The children managed to ask and answer questions regarding their eye drawings:  ‘ What is the most popular eye colour in our class? ‘ ‘ How many children have green eyes?’ and so on.

We have practised name writing everyday and would ask you to practice this at home too if your child is developing name writing skills.

Our portrait wall is complete now this week’s starters have arrived. Everyone painted themselves in their new uniform, chatted about what they liked best about it and all wrote their name for our display.

While one of us is busy working one to one on directed tasks with the children, the rest are busying themselves with the continuous provision activities in the classroom. These times allow the children to play, explore, try something out that we’ve talked about, build, make, paint, cut and best of all learn to share and play with each other. Here are a few photos of some of the children working independently.

Some of the activities on offer this week were:

During the Reception year we are looking for a set of characteristics that enable effective learning. It is true to say they are effective throughout life! They include: Keep on trying, having a go, joining in and concentrating, playing well, having your own ideas, choosing ways to do things, making good links, exploring new ideas, and being proud of your achievements.

I’m looking forward to the fun that will be had next week in Oak Class Reception already,  see you then!

Hello and welcome to Oak Class, our Reception class at St  Matthew’s.

Each week I will post a few photos of the children learning and playing. I will focus on the weekly themes, sounds, letters, numbers and stories.

This week we have all been settling in to the new school routine, as well as getting to know our friends.

All the children have managed to paint a self portrait of themselves, have a go at writing their name independently, admired and spoken about their new uniform, and managed to tell us a little about their summer’s.

Snack time

Lunch time …

Our theme this term is Take a Peek…  can you spot your child’s eyes? !

Or you child’s baby picture?

The children have been painting their portraits – looking closely in the mirror to get their faces and of course new school uniform just right … I’m in the midst of putting them up!

Our role play area in the classroom is a baby clinic and the children have been busy changing, weighing, feeding and looking after all the babies. Through this interactive role play the children are collaborating and getting to know each other.

Our stories this week have all been starting school stories: 

The children have been busy in the classroom, building with lego, creating stories with wild animals, colouring, painting,designing and creating tracks,  playing trains and finding quiet reading corners when things get too much! In our outdoor classroom we have had lots of writing, number work and building with the big community blocks outside. During break- time – sliding, climbing, running, chasing, riding the school bicycles playing with hoops   and investigating all the activities on offer in the classroom.

Look out for an overview of our work Reception coming to you via a PowerPoint on email. Thank you very much for bringing in the wellies, PE kits  and baby pictures. Very much appreciated.

General class logistics:

• Please bring any CLEAN recycling to school –  we fly through cereal boxes and the like for our amazing junk modelling creations!
• Book bags will go home next week – on your child’s book bag day. Please return it the next week on the same day. No need for the book bag to come in everyday.
• The children will be bringing 4 books of their choice home a week. As term progresses we will add ‘ reading books‘ into the bag for them to read to you.
• Please contribute crackers/ breadsticks/ biscuits/ chedders etc to our class snack scheme every so often. This means there is NO NEED TO BRING A SEPARATE SNACK EACH DAY. 

Sorry for all these logistics – once in place – the year runs very smoothly!

Thanks so much for your support – please pass on the details of this blog to all the parents/ carers in the class.

Enjoy the weekend!

Looking forward to next week already!

Mrs Bibby 🙂

A very tricky good afternoon to all our lovely families. Here are some bits and pieces we’ve been up to this week.

Following on from our weather station, thermometer making and life with Elmer, ( who always seems to be under a rain cloud!)  the children have made rain sticks . They thoroughly enjoyed this activity.

It was science week this week. Mr Peck began the week with a fab assembly introducing us to some amazing scientific concepts. The week was based around environmental science and a very visual activity of how the ice in the arctic is melting at an incredible rate and the effects on the wildlife – the children stood on a huge tarpaulin (to represent ice) and pretended to be seals. Other children surrounded it pretending to be polar bears. Every 5 or so minutes during the assembly the ‘ seals’ had to fold their tarpaulin ice in half, without any falling off to be eaten by the polar bears. It wasn’t long before we had a very visual idea of the impact climate change is having on our wildlife – with the seals all crammed onto a tiny block of ice desperate not to be caught by the circling polar bears.

Linking to this, our class’ science experiment has been to try and make a hole through a block of ice. Armed with ice blocks, hammers, salt and water the children set to work with varying degrees of success. By the end of the week – we found out that by pouring water on the same spot for a minute or so made a perfect hole through the ice! We were due to present this phenomenon in Mondays assembly, instead maybe you could try it at home!

In maths we were finding 2, 3, 4 or even 5 numbers that added together would make 10!

In literacy we have concentrated on segmenting longer words – in groups of three – segmenting words into sounds, writing each sound on a different post it note and then blending the sounds to write them on the whiteboard.

In RE we continued to look at our world, thinking about how WE can look after it. The children have learnt the following song – they know lots of actions – please let them sing it / show you !

Sorry to spoil the surprise ( don’t tell your little one I have) but much of this week was dedicated to Mother’s Day – we made cards, did some writing and made a special stone for you to keep!

Thank you for letting us look after your little ones, we’ve had so much fun and are looking forward  to seeing them all again very soon. Good luck with your ‘ home learning’ – just have a go and do your best! If you can’t do it – please just read a story EVERY DAY to your child and ask them to read a bit to you too.

Hello !

This week we have immersed ourselves in flags, their designs, what country they represent and even made our own flags. We have added an extra role play area of Jack and the Beanstalk,   alongside our weather station,  to help with our writing this week too.

We have watched this flag video with the sound muted and listened to Wavin’ Flag as our sound track – the children loved it and were so interested in each countries flag design. Asking some excellent questions. I’ve attached both links below in case you want to have a look with them at home. The children talked about their  family affiliations from all around the world, as well as remembering countries they have visited. It has enabled some really lovely work in  which everybody had a shared interest.

A line of our own flags. 

Our 10 green bottles were a source of much fun this week. Task: to order them either by number or capacity … not take the lids off and squirt the red water everywhere! Safe to say Mrs Mooney and I won’t be using this activity again!! I live and learn! On the plus side, capacity was an interesting concept for lots of the children, with many referrals to cups/ bottles being filled at bath time to play with. Talk about more/ less/ full empty/ half full and so on at home – the children love playing with water!

Calculators caused a stir and enabled the children to show me numbers / match numbers and read numbers successfully. Everyone had a go with the calculators – it was a great example of number work and even gave us evidence for technology and understanding the world as we talked about solar power as well.

More number work – this time to fill the cups with the right number of cubes in  a set time. Much enjoyment, hilarity of cups falling over and lots of checking each others work to see how each other had got on. Fantastic matching and counting with extensions of  higher level questioning: Which two cups do I  need to make 10?  If all the cups are correct how many cubes do we have altogether? and so on…

Our dice activity this week was a directed task,  recorded in our  Challenge Books. Each child had to roll the dice, read and record the number they had rolled. They then had to understand a range of positional language such as: ind the number on the opposite side/ underneath/ the number at the bottom  – they then recorded this number followed by adding the two numbers together. If you have a dice, ask them to show you – they should be able to tell you the magic number they found each time!

Our Jack and the Beanstalk area had a beanstalk, had the giant, had a chicken and a golden egg, even a cow but not a castle… the children took it upon themselves to build their own giants castle.

Writing numbers is always tricky in Reception – its never easy to know where to start when writing a number. These number moulds help the children work out which way to write their numbers by following the route of the marble in the mould.

We talked a lot about 2D shape this week – the children enjoyed copying or designing their own flag using the shapes.

In PE we are getting adventurous and completing our forward rolls at height, with climbing, balancing, jumping and bench bunny hops too.  The children really enjoy our warm ups and are all fab at squats,  star jumps and burpees!

Have a great week!

Hello!

Firstly an apology,  the target sheets that went out on Wednesday evening were supposed to come home the Friday before half term, just after parent’s evening.   Unfortunately they helpfully got ‘filed’ instead. Thank you to the mum that reminded us this week.

This week we have continued analysing the weather – enjoying our daily dose of the weather forecast carrying on with lots of weather activities in our weather station.

Our stories have been from the Elmer collection of books by David MacKee. They also make good links to our weather – there’s always a rain cloud looming for Elmer!

The children have really enjoyed trying to create their own colourful patchwork elephants…

Flooded the classroom creating various rain showers…

Made a collage our own Elmer for display…

In this weeks directed writing we have made story boards of the Elmer story and then used our story boards to re-write the story. We are moving writing on from words and captions to extended writing. Using all our sound knowledge to segment the words we need for our sentences. The children firstly need to think of a sentence, count the words in the sentence, start sounding out and segmenting the first word, write it, using a finger space and moving on to repeat for each word in the sentence. For lots this is a long and laborious process It really starts to get them going on writing independently.

We have finished our second set of sounds – since half term covering:  ear, er, ur, air, ture, ow, oi, igh, oa  all tricky ones to remember when reading and writing so any practice at home on these trickier  sounds would be great!

Written all about Elmer and the weather…

Matched clothing to various weather types…

Used sound pegs to combine fine motor and segmenting words:

Used the numicon and peg boards to create patterns like Elmer’s. The children started on AB patterns ( ie red/blue/red/blue)  and continued  up to ABCD patterns. ie 4 colours in turn. This is a tricky skill when you are small.

Our directed maths task was a huge hit. We had dice,  ( including an interactive one on the smart-board) grids of ten squares and we simply had to roll the dice and tick off the correct number of squares… the children had to : Recognise the numbers on the die, tell me the highest and lowest number that could be found on the die, work out how many more they need to roll to fill their grid and if they could,  tell me how many more rolls of the dice they needed to do this,  including what they would need to roll. Fun with lots of thinking too.

Number work continued with our thermometer making. The children have been very interested in temperature and regularly checking our weather station thermometer so we decided to make our own thermometers.

The children also found ways to make 10 using the numicon boards. They recorded their findings…

Using our Elmer’s to help with our number work was super – the children enjoyed working out how many footprints an elephant makes as he walks along! We will have them reciting the 4 x table before the year is out!!

As always, building and junk modelling is a massive hit everyday…

What fabulous World Book Day costumes – just fantastic – I’m sorry to have missed them. Well done Reception ( especially parents!) on brilliant character choices and superb costumes!

Have a great weekend Oak Class !

Welcome back after half term – I hope you all enjoyed a well earned break from the morning school routine/stress! We are now officially half way through your little ones first year of school, they have all changed a lot, becoming older and wiser already!

This week we have discussed our half term’ s and in number work concentrated on matching amounts/ numbers and numicon pieces. We also played lots of board games including Snakes and Ladders.

Snakes and Ladders proved a very popular choice with even a queue forming ready to play next! The children were excited to see a familiar game and were articulate in explaining the rules to each other. They used 2 dice and added up their scores, they moved their counter accurately, counting carefully and most children were able to recognise the tens numbers on the board squares. A great fun game if you are ever at a loss of what to do with your little one!

Our Out and About topic has taken us to analysing the weather! We have watched daily BBC weather forecasts – discussed our favourite types of weather and why and begun to make up our own weather forecasts in our class weather station.  The writing table has had many children writing their own forecasts and everyone has come to the weather station to write weather words independently.

Our fine motor skills have been tested trying to thread ‘ raindrops’ from clouds …

The water tray has been transformed using various crates, tubing, drainpipes, sieves and funnels to make pathways for  water to travel through. The children are so inventive and have used the equipment to create some convoluted and jolly impressive pipelines!

Weather and number work combine – the children had to measure mounts of water with the syringes and fill the buckets. They were able to read the calibrated syringes accurately and some able to add up how many millilitres of water they had added!

Construction, in its various guises is always popular. It leads to creativity, sharing equipment along with helping/ advising each other – all good skills to hone for the future.

On Tuesday we were very busy learning about Shrove Tuesday. Using up the provisions in the cupboard, by making pancakes and preparing to give something up for the 40 days of Lent until Easter. The children have all written their own Lenten Promise as well as made pancakes! In small groups we made our chef’s hats, followed by the pancake batter and later on in the day watched our pancakes being cooked before enjoying tucking into them as an afternoon snack!

Our favourite story of the week was: Mr Wolf’s Pancakes by Jan Fearnley. Get your child to tell you about the twist at the end!

On Wednesday Mother Helen, from our school Church St Matthew’s,  came to our assembly and told us all about Ash Wednesday. She explained how Christians believe we came from dust and will return to dust. At the end of the assembly the children could chose to have ashes from last years Palm Sunday crosses be drawn in a cross on their foreheads.

On Friday Reception class had a very special visit from Mr Quinn and his dog Charlie:

The writing area was very busy this week too…

Hope you have all had a good week too. Enjoy the weekend 🙂

Hello! Happy Valentine’s Day!

This week we began with an assembly and workshop on using the internet safely. The children enjoyed an active session finding out some sensible rules to remember if ever using the internet.

Our water tray turned into beautiful pink sand with some glitter too. Hidden in the sand were a variety of heart shaped objects – the children’s  job was to count how many heart shaped objects they could find. After having a go at this they all enjoyed making heart shaped,  pink sand cup cakes!  We learnt about St Valentine,  a Roman priest in the 3rd Century who helped young couples be married in secret; since Emperor Claudius was struggling to recruit young men into his army, he had  decided it was because they had too strong an attachment to their wives. He therefore banned all marriages and engagements in Rome! Valentine was jailed for his secret marriages and it is said even wrote a love letter to the jailers daughter. Hence the tradition of our Valentine’s cards today.

Tricky words and cvc words were the selection at the beginning of the week – all the children were able to read and find the right letters to match the words they’d chosen.

We looked our names and found the blocks that would spell our names – we counted how many letters were in our name and then compared with a friend – ‘ Oh you have 6 letters I have 4 in my name – you have 2 more than me’ This was a simple and effective way to get some meaningful counting, comparing and finding difference.

This week was all about love and our families, we borrowed the dolls house from nursery for the week.  It was busy all week with some super narrative between friends playing and re- enacting stories from their own home lives.

Some great reading and writing this week getting ready for our Valentine’s cards. All the children enjoyed having their hand painted and then a small heart placed in their palm before making the hand-print… some came out better than others!

The children’s own creativity had them decorating Valentine hearts…

This weeks circle time was thinking about who you love and why you love them? I can safely confirm that all readers of this blog were mentioned – mostly for cooking nice dinners!!

Some excellent pencil rolls, forward rolls, and balances this week in PE.

Lots of reading – from individual to group and caption or question reading. The children are really coming along and making great progress. We are very pleased.

It was lovely to see you all at the parent’s evenings this week. Ten minutes is such a short time, so please do pop in for a chat after school one afternoon if there is more you would like to discuss.

Have lovely half terms – I hope you enjoy a rest and some adventures too.

Hello, we’ve had another busy week in Reception Oak class – continuing with our trains and travelling out and about. We started the week with a survey of how we travel to school and discovered Harry comes in a Bat-mobile! I wasn’t expecting that! We learned how to do a tally to record the numbers of children that came in different ways. The children went on to draw a picture of how they come to school and we now have a pictograph on the wall depicting their varying modes of transport!

The classroom has been a hive of activity – the children had various vehicles with different wheels / tyres and used them to make tracks using paint. Simple but popular, useful for gross and fine motor skills.

Our paint tracks soon became pieces of modern art!!

Being able to sort and explain similarities and difference is a key goal in Reception, whether with colour/ pattern / number – this week we used vehicles.

The children challenged themselves with the task of designing their own vehicle and trying to make it. Two good examples of their work here:

Tricky to see in this photo but all the children have made a helicopter! In our story The Runaway Train by Benedict Blathwayt the hero of the story : Duffy the train driver has to catch up with his runaway train – he tries lorries, horses, bicycles and boats but manages to catch up his train with a helicopter! The children loved the excitement and drama in the story – mostly relayed through the pictures as the text is simple. They were all taken by the helicopters so we decided to make our own!

Our junk modelling work station is always busy – the conversation, sharing, listening, understanding and of course helping each other find the end of the sellotape is all invaluable for the prime areas of our Early Years curriculum. The children used their imaginations to make wonderful creations that they are always so proud of. Please keep filling our brown trunk outside the classroom with your clean recycling!

Our topic continued with not only knowing about vehicles but also how to fix them. This week we have had a bicycle maintenance station. Everybody has become fully involved in the challenge using real spanners to undo all the nuts and bolts on the bicycles. Wheels have been taken off, stabilisers detached and reattached, saddles and handlebars adjusted. The children love the independence of having real objects to use in their work. It’s always great to see how able and independent the children are with real life situations.

In our number work we have been identifying, comparing , understanding bigger and smaller numbers in relation to each other and finding the difference.

In PE we focused on forward rolls to varying degrees of success – we will persevere next week! Re saw the children identifying God’s animals and noticing the differences and similarities: large/ small/ tall/ short/ thin/ fat/ hairy/ furry/ smooth/ with a shell/ slow/ fast/ legs/ no legs and so on. After much discussion the children ‘ designed’ their own animal … this was fun and we got some fantastic pictures for our RE journal!

Te children have had fun learning the short and long oo sounds. Short as in ‘book’ long as in ‘ moon’ along with practising their tricky words. We’ve all had individual reading sessions and group reading sessions.

Thank you to all who managed to bring in a favourite book from home this week – I’m sorry it was such short notice. We had a lovely circle time discussing why we liked our book – talking about characters/ setting/ and how the story ends. The children that had non-fiction books enabled us to see a contents and how to use it to find out information you needed to know or were interested in. We managed to take a picture of each child with their book and photocopy the cover to use for our favourite book display. We interviewed the children and wrote down why they liked their book to add to our display.

Have a great week!

Hello and sorry for the blog delay – I was away for the weekend and no access to our school apps.

Anyway here is a very brief overview of some of the highlights of last week!  We started moving our OUT and ABOUT topic from the wintry weather to actually getting out and about – we focused on trains. We had a class discussion about trains,  stations and everything you might find or need on a train or in a station. The children were brilliant and came up with over 30 ideas – including the yellow line that you shouldn’t cross on the platform ‘ to keep you safe from the train line.’ We tried to incorporate as many of the children’s ideas as we could into our train role play area. The children made most of the resources they needed.

Painting the wheels for the train.

Painting the train.

Cutting out the tickets.

Eventually we had our very own train station.

Our stories for the week were The Little Red Train series of books by Benedict Blathwayt. They have fantastic illustrations, the children adore the stories and they inspired some lovely writing.  I can highly recommend them.

Of course the train track was out and the classroom turned into a huge track with multiple children, building and playing, using some fantastic language too. A few children said they had never been on a train – please do take your children on a quick train ride – they travel for free – show them the buffers, the tracks, signals, point and of course the yellow line on the platform!

Our fine motor work had the children weaving pipe cleaners  through colanders.The y all really enjoyed this and it is great for strengthening the muscles in the hands for letter formation.

We had a timed water tray activity – washing cars … it became quite competitive – it won’t be long until you can ask them to wash the family car!

This term we are doing  gym and last week we learnt pencil rolls and balances.

Sorry it’s brief – next blog at the weekend!

Thanks Erin Bibby

On Saturday 25th January it’s the Chinese New Year – the new year being the year of the rat. To this end we have embraced Chinese themed activities this week alongside our Winter theme.

We have found China on the map and discussed what we might find in China –  of course the panda bear was a popular choice so our small world play revolved around pandas. Lots of lovely stories were developed using the pandas as the children played.

We added a Chinese restaurant to our role play and the children got dressed into some traditional Chinese clothes to partake in meals at the restaurant. The chopsticks proved a challenge for most children … cleaning the floor of rice at the end of the day proved the challenge for us!!

We listened to the story and then saw a short video depiction of the Chinese story of The Great Race which tells of how each of the years of the Chinese zodiac were named. The children then had to order the animals from first to twelfth … this was easier said than done. Some children had an animal – the other children had to direct them where to stand to get the animals in the correct order.

Our fine motor skills were exercised by trying to fill the bowls and packets with rice using the tweezers… some children found a much easier way to achieve this… borrowing the spoon from our Chinese restaurant was a much quicker and far more successful method!

Everyone had a go at Chinese Bingo – matching the themed pictures and all enjoyed trying to write numbers in Chinese!

More fine motor work, cutting,  folding and sticking a Chinese dragon.

Our igloo building project came to a close and the children have been enjoying playing in our igloo, reading in our igloo and explaining to any class visitors just how it was made. Unfortunately quite early on our roof effort collapsed so we have put an icy  cover over instead!

Our stick collecting was very fruitful and the children have made some wonderful wintry trees.

Following our Winter theme we have all named and smelt a variety of winter vegetables and discussed how/ where they might be grown and if they have eaten them before. Mrs Mooney and I did the chopping ( as the knives were very sharp!) and we made some tasty winter vegetable soup. All the children had a taste, some enjoyed it more than others.

Alongside all this fun we have been finding number bonds to 10, reading individually and in groups, blending, learning new sounds and writing some winter words for our winter tree display. We have had circle times, written our traffic light sentences , made dark and light collages for our RE lesson, as well as using the litter pickers to keep our playground a tidy and nice place to be. In PE we are during a gymnastics topic and the children are working together stretching, rolling, jumping, and balancing.

Have a great weekend Oak Class families. Just a note – I’m away next weekend and might not get the chance to download photos and type up a Blog as I won’t have access to a computer. I will try my best before I go!

Thanks , Erin Bibby