The excitement has been starting to build in Reception this week as we have begun our Christmas show rehearsals in earnest!  The show itself will take place on Tuesday 6th December at 2pm and then again on Wednesday 7th December at 9.30am.  Year 1, year 2 and nursery children are also involved in the performance and, therefore, parents and carers are invited to attend one performance only so as to ensure everyone can actually fit in the hall!  In our case, Reception parents are invited to attend the Wednesday morning performance.

Although we have been very busy with our rehearsals, we also found time to practise the sounds we have learnt so far and to learn three new ones.  First, we pulled ‘r’ out of the sound bag.  The action for ‘r’ is to pretend to be an animal playing and growling.  This can be a bit tricky, as it is easy to let the sound become a ‘grrr’ from the throat, rather than a ‘rrrrr’ from the front of the mouth.  Try practising both to see the difference!

Next, we pulled ‘h’ out of the sound bag.  We imagined we had been running around the oak tree in our playground ten times before we had to stop, huffing and puffing because we were out of breath!  The action for ‘h’ is to put your hand in front of your mouth and feel the puffs of air as you say ‘h’, ‘h’, ‘h’ and pretend to catch your breath.

The third sound to come out of the sound bag this week was ‘b’.  We all pretended to bounce a ball to help us learn and remember this sound.  Please note, the jolly phonics action for ‘b’ is to pretend to hit a ball with a bat, which is pretty similar to our bouncing ball action.  We decided to use a bounce instead of a bat and ball to keep our action smaller, and therefore a bit safer for each other, when sitting altogether on the carpet!

We also learnt two new tricky words this week; ‘no’ and ‘into’.  We have now learnt all of the phase 2 tricky words and we will move onto the phase 3 ones next week.  Please look out for a tricky word pot in your book bag over the coming week or so.

Finally, it has also been a busy week in the castle of course! The resident princesses have been getting ready for their next banquet while the brave knights have been protecting the castle from all manner of scary beasts!

And here you can see the workers were not afraid to get their hands dirty when painting the drawbridge!