St John the Baptist CE VA Primary School Reception

We have been very busy in Reception since returning to school.

We learnt to tell the story of Jack and the Beanstalk through music, dance and drama and made collage pictures of Jack climbing the beanstalk.

This week we have planted a bean of our own and will be observing it every day to see if it is growing. We will have a competition to see whose bean will grow the tallest.

In maths we having been doing some addition work and learning to double and half numbers.

This we have learnt all about owls. We started the week reading Owl Babies wrote sentences in a speech bubbles made owls and found out some fascinating owl facts.

Some children made their own owl story books.

We have learnt about light sources and carried out some investigation work using torches to see which materials were reflective.

Phonics

We are working very hard with our phonics and have been doing some fantastic work on blending and writing simple words.

Reception took part in the skip to keep fit event. They learnt how to use a skipping rope and took part in a motivational music keep fit challenge. Everyone tried their best and persevered.

The children were given a box of blueberries, and were asked to reuse and recycle their pots. The children were given leaflets that explained how to download the motivational skipping app and how to make a tasty smoothie recipe.

This week we have been learning about Diwali the Hindu festival of light.

We read the story of Rama and Sita and acted out the story to a song we learnt.

We have been very busy making crowns, Rangoli patterns, Diya lamps, mehndi patterns as well as happy Diwali cards to celebrate Diwali.

The children made some fantastic boats for their homework. We filled the water tray up and tested our boats to see how well they would float in the water. We also found some little play people to put in our boats to find out how safe they were to travel in.

This week we learnt about why we celebrate Bonfire night. We watched a firework display clip on the interactive board and made a list of all the different sounds we could hear that the fireworks made.

We wrote our firework words on stars using our phonics and are going to make a special firework display in our classroom.

We created rockets using 2D shapes and had so much fun making firework pictures using splash painting techniques!

We drew firework patterns with the chalk on black paper using zig-zags, wavy lines, straight lines and curved lines.

In maths we have really enjoyed playing number bingo and splotting the numbers with a sponge – great fun.

To remember we painted poppies and made a class display. How many poppies can you count?

 Today in Forest School the children learnt about some of the animals who might live around our school. We learnt about animals that hibernate and we made some hedgehogs using clay, pine cones and other materials. The children made homes for their hedgehog to spend the winter in.

We made a big pile of leaves and twigs and hide the hedgehog inside to sleep. We finished with a song about the hedgehog and a story called Ouch about a very unlucky hedgehog.

This week we read the story of ‘A Pipkin of Pepper’ by

Helen Cooper. A story about Pumpkin soup the best you ever tasted.

We had great fun making our own Pumpkin soup, in the mud kitchen, mixing and stirring and serving our own soups that we pretended to make!

Some Pumpkins magically arrived in our classroom and we had great fun using tweezers to take the seeds out of the Pumpkin.

We are going to plant the seeds in our garden to see if we can grow our very own pumpkins. Watch this space! We also used the seeds to make some collage pictures.

Once we had collected all the seeds we then used the outside of the pumpkins for finger gym, using little hammers to hammer golf tees into the pumpkin.

In maths we learnt about 2d shapes and their properties and had fun making lots of different shape pictures.

This week we read the story of the Colour Monster.

We talked a lot about our feelings and how we feel.

We coloured in a colour monster to show how we were feeling and tried to write the colour and how we felt using our phonics.

We are very proud of the Autumn tree we all made. There might be some creatures hiding in the branches!

This week we read the story of Rosie’s Walk. We made a story together and learnt to tell the story off by heart.

Next we had a go at drawing our own story maps.

In PE we made an obstacle course and practiced using some positional language like the story.  We had fun going along the bench, under and over the agility table’s and through the hoops

For Harvest this week we read the story of The Little Red Hen. We made a story map and learnt the story off by heart.

On Tuesday we made some delicious bread that made our classroom smell wonderful. We all enjoyed eating the bread!

We had fun learning how to ride balance bikes around the playground.

Reception have settled really well into school life and have been busy making new friends.

We have been enjoying a variety of activities in our learning environment and finding out what we can do.

We have been having lots of fun.