Hello!

This week in Reception we have been ‘ taking a peek’ at the wonderful story Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. It’s an old favourite and many of the children were familiar with the story which enables our learning to extend far and wide!

We joined in with the rhyming, spotted all the fairy tale/ nursery rhyme characters as we read. Recalled the nursery rhymes or stories the characters derived from as well as deciding on which character we would like to be in the story and acting / role-playing our favourite parts! Some of our already keen writers took to making name labels for the various characters in our  Each Peach Pear Plum small world play.

The children have been enjoying their new playground doing lots of chalking, climbing, sliding and cycling.

As the children are now mostly settled at school we are assessing them for a starting point for the prime areas of  the Early Years Curriculum – these include: Health and Self Care, Making Relationships, Managing Feelings and Behaviour, Fine and Gross Motor Skills , Speaking , Listening and Understanding, along with awareness of reading/ writing/ number and shape. We do this through observations during choosing time – setting up activities that will encourage and stimulate play covering each of those areas. As well as through teaching / questioning and directed tasks.

This week we have covered lots of number work and fine motor work – finding the right number of pegs to fit the holes in the wooden numbers, threading a certain number of buttons/ beads onto various strings/ pipe cleaners/ ribbons, playing snakes and ladders – a fab game for number recognition/ counting/ turn taking/ making relationships and  managing your feelings! Using tweezers to place the right number of tiny beads into each pot and playing noughts and crosses with a friend

We continue to assess during learning time on the carpet through directed questions such as counting altogether and then finding out 1 more or 1 less than a given number. All the children took part in a directed activity of writing their name and counting how many letters were in their name. We looked at which children had the longest and shortest names and how many people had 4 letters in their name and which number of letters in a name was the most popular in our class.

We started our new number and writing books. All the children took part in a directed writing and two directed number activities.

During circle time we looked at the letter I … we used it to talk about what we liked, what we could do and who we are.

I am …

I like…

I can …

after everyone had had a go at speaking and most importantly listening to our friends, we coloured in our own I.

We started our RE and PE curriculum this week – many apologies for any swopped clothing – it was a stressful afternoon – I hope you have all managed to reunite each others clothes via the WhatsApp group…. particularly the boys and their socks – they were all adamant that although they couldn’t find their socks that none of the left over pairs were theirs!

We learnt our class prayer and had some quiet time as well as some children volunteering to come to the front and lead the class in their own prayer.

Our class prayer  :

Thank you for the world so sweet,

Thank you for the food we eat,

Thank you for the birds that sing,

Thank you God for everything.

Amen

Our book bag system is up and running – as a reminder at the moment, the children will be bringing 4 books home, of their choice,  each week on their book bag day. Please remember to only bring your book bag on the day you change your books.( The day written on the cover of your yellow book.)  Our peg area is very small and we are unable to cope with extra bags or belongings. Please bring the minimum to school each day. A named water bottle and  a named coat appropriate for that days weather,  as best you can determine!

The children  have done lots of looking and peeking this week finding out new things, as well as role play and the usual building both big and small.

Thank you to all who have replenished our junk modelling stocks. We are quarantining each delivery for 72 hours and soon you will be seeing amazing creations coming home from your children!  We now have enough recycling to last us up until about half term 🙂 Thank you.

Next week we will be ‘ taking a peek’ at The Owl Babies by Martin Waddell, hopefully another familiar tales for the children that we can use to stimulate some lovely work.  

Have a lovely weekend. See you all on Monday!