It has been such a busy week in Reception with Christmas rehearsals now in full swing and the dress rehearsal just around the corner (this coming Monday). We finished off the week with a mufti day to support our Christmas Fair which is being organised by our fantastic PTA (and takes place on Friday 9th) and, as you can see, some of the Reception team are already feeling very Christmassy!
Yesterday, we found time to take a walk out of school to a nearby postbox where we each posted a letter to our parents. We carefully checked our envelopes to make sure they all had an address and a stamp on them before taking turns to pop them in the postbox. I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing the contents as everyone’s envelope should be arriving home very soon! Please look out for the letter and let your child know when it arrives to encourage their understanding of the journey a letter takes from a postbox to a house.
As we were waiting to post our letters we met a real-live postman who was busy delivering to the nearby houses. He even stopped to have a chat with us and find out what we were doing. He thought we were probably posting letters to Santa but the children soon set him straight! Many of them thought he was Postman Pat and he was kind enough to go along with this, even chatting away about his cat Jess!
Here’s what he actually looked like!
During our phonics lessons this week, we learnt three new sounds as usual; 2 single letter sounds (f and l) and another digraph (ff).
‘F’ and ‘ff’ make the same sound and have the same action. We imagined trying to deflate an inflatable toy by slowly squeezing it together between our hands. As we did the action, we said ‘fffff’ making sure our top teeth gently touched our lower lips as the air came out between our lips.
When learning the digraph ‘ff’, we read the story of The Little Pigs and we all knew exactly what the Big Bad Wolf says when he tries to blow down the houses!
Weekend challenge: Can you spot the digraph ‘ff’ on the page above? How many times can you spot it? Can you have a go at writing the words ‘huff’ and ‘puff’? Listen carefully for the three sounds in the words and write them down. You can do it!
Finally, we pretended to lick delicious lollipops as we learnt the sound ‘l’. This is such a tricky sound because the action encourages us to stick our tongues out when actually your tongue should stay in your mouth and touch your top teeth. Try to think of it as ‘ull’ rather than ‘luh’.
