Welcome back everyone, we hope you all had a fun and restful half term break!

In Reception, we have jumped straight back into lots of very busy playing, exploring and learning.  We have been putting together a new role-play area (more details to follow…) and we have been learning the names and properties (e.g. number of sides and corners) of 2D shapes (i.e. circles, triangles, rectangles and squares).

This week, we have also been taking some time to think about what it means to be a good friend.  We read the story of the beautiful Rainbow Fish who learns how to make friends by sharing his shimmery scales and the story of George and Nepo (Kings of the Castle) who work out how to become friends even though they don’t speak the same language. These are both particularly lovely books if you have a chance to re-read them at home.

We also pulled three new sounds out of the sound bag.

First came ‘m’ and we used our imaginations to think about a delicious chocolate cupcake with ice-cream, chocolate sauce and sprinkles on top!  We all said ‘mmmmmm’ as we rubbed our tummies.  What is your favourite food? What makes you say ‘mmmmmm’!

Next came the sound ‘d’ and we all used our drumsticks to play our imaginary drums – d, d, d, d, d, d, d.

Finally, we read the story of Inky Mouse who puts the plug in the sink, fills it up with water and carefully washes his ears and whiskers.  When he’s nice and clean, he pulls the plug out of the sink and listens carefully as the water swirls down the plughole – g, g, g, g, g.

We have been working really hard this week to make sure we are saying the sounds correctly and not ‘dropping our lower jaw’ especially when we say sounds like ‘n’ (remember it’s not ‘nuh’) and ‘t’ (it’s not ‘tuh’).

Keep practising everyone!