Reception
Reception
Our caterpillars have turned into butterflies! Over the last few weeks, we have been watching excitedly as our caterpillar’s grew, then created their cocoons, then turned into beautiful butterflies! We have released them back into the wild for them to carry on the lifecycle.
Snail sandwiches – yum! This week, we have been practicing following instructions and our knife skills by making snail sandwiches! (no snails were harmed in the making – jam and carrots took their place.)
We have planted tomatoes and marigolds. Thank you very much to Valerie for donating them! We learned that marigold attract the bees, so are good to plant with tomatoes. We are watering them each and checking to see if any minibeasts have appeared.
This week, we heard the story of Pentecost, and used collage to create flames. We then decided that it would be a good technique to use for Minibeasts, so children have been using outlines to create their own minibeast collages. We learned that it is important to cover the area and not leave any white space.
Is it possible to make a bridge that will hold up a toy car out of paper? At first, many of us thought it wasn’t! But, by learning to roll and fold the paper to make it stronger, and by persevering hard, we all managed it! Have a look at some of our fantastic creations.
In Reception, we have created a kindness tree to help us think about our Value of Service. On it, we tie leaves whenever someone is kind or helpful around the classroom. By the end of the term, it will be blooming!
At Forest School, Reception have been making natural prints on cotton, using flowers and leaves. They have been learning how to use a hammer safely to achieve this, and their beautiful work is now up as bunting in our reception area on the forest school board – come and have a look!
Nadine, our local PCSO came to talk to us about the work she does in the community. We learned that Police Officers don’t just lock people up, they do lots of work to help people and keep them safe. This was a great start to looking at our Value of Service.
On Wednesday, Reception went on their first ever school trip! We went on a coach to the RAF Museum at Hendon. We spent some time exploring the planes and helicopters, and discovered that scientists have studied lots of animals to help with plane design, including hippos, bees and eagles. After lunch, we took part in a workshop all about helicopters. We found out about how they work, the different jobs they do, and then we had the chance to make and fly our own paper helicopters! We had to predict what we thought would happen, then test our predictions by dropping them from up high. We all had a fabulous day and learned lots.
We held a vote to decide on our new role play area, and the most popular choice was a toyshop. We spent the end of last week creating posters and price tags and setting up our shop, ready for its opening this week! We are enjoying our role play while learning about the value of coins and how shops work.
Easter Craft
On Friday 22nd March, Reception enjoyed an Easter craft workshop together with parents and carers. We made Easter Egg sun catchers, Easter boxes and all of us enjoyed creating our part in a collaborative oil pastel mural which will go up in the school. Watch this space!
We’ve planted beans, learned about how to look after them and their lifecycle, decorated castles and stuck them above our plant pots to see if our beanstalks can reach them, written about what we would like to find at the top of the beanstalk…let’s see what happens!
This week Reception have been estimating and measuring! We’ve learned that we can measure with almost anything, as long as each piece is the same length, and we don’t leave any gaps. We’ve also started learning to use more standard measurements such as centimetres, by exploring rulers and tape measures. We even measured a giant’s footprints when he paid us a visit…
We’ve been celebrating Shrove Tuesday in Reception. We tasted different toppings and made a class bar graph to find out which was the most popular – it seems that chocolate sauce won!
‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down!’ In Reception, we’ve started looking at traditional tales, and have been enjoying the story of the Three Little Pigs. We’ve been telling the story in lots of ways and building houses in different ways too, inside and out! On Wednesday, Rev. Anne came to visit us and tell us one of her favourite stories from the Bible.
It’s the Year of the Pig, and we’ve been learning all about Chinese New Year. We’ve been looking at how Chinese writing is different from our own, and painting our names on lucky red banners in Chinese characters. Did you know that the Chinese write down the page instead of left to right?
There have been lots of budding palaeontologists in Reception this week! We’ve been finding out about dinosaur digs around the world and having a go at it ourselves. We realised that palaeontologists have to be very careful and gentle to avoid damaging their finds.
We’ve been working on doubling. On the carpet, we used Spike the Spinosaurus to help us remember to add the same number to itself, and we’ve been practicing by doubling the number of playdough spots on ladybirds.
We’ve been having bean bag races! Our goal was to get as many bean bags back to the hoop as possible in 30 seconds. We then had to work out how many bean bags we had altogether. We worked out we could count up one group and then count on with the other group. The playground makes a great place to practice our number sentences!
This week we have been exercising our creativity and creating our own dinosaurs! We thought about what they looked like, where they lived, what they at …have a look at some of our creations.
On Tuesday, we found something very strange in our reception garden – some eggs had appeared! What could they be?! Guesses ranged from eagles, to dragons, to crocodiles. We thought about ways to keep them safe, and made posters to make stop people touching them! When the eggs hatched, we realised they were dinosaurs! We’ve been painting pictures of them, reading books about them and have set up a new dinosaur den for them to live in…
We have written letters to Santa, and we are going to walk to the post box to send them! We hope they get there in time! In forest school, the children have been learning how to use palm drills, and making decorations from wood cookies.
We’ve been getting ready for Christmas in Reception – the children decided we needed a real Santa to go in our Santa’s grotto, are so here they painting one! We’ve been enjoying more Secret Story tellers as well – it’s great fun to see whose Mum/Dad/Grandparent will turn up each week!
It’s been a busy week! We took part in our play ‘Whoops-a-Daisie Angel’ and had a fantastic time -we loved performing with our friends in Year 1. We also had a lovely time making Christmas Decorations with parents and carers.
This week, Mr Nicholson our caretaker brought in his gorgeous pet Dumbo rat Coco. We had the chance to hold her and we found out lots of fascinating facts. Did you know that a rat’s tail is always the same length as its body? We’ve also been thinking about our value of trust, and we realised that Mr Nicholson needed to trust us to be kind and gentle with her.
This week the fire engine came to visit Reception class! We had the chance to climb inside the engine cab and also to squirt the hoses. They were extremely powerful! The fabulous firemen also showed us all the different equipment they have on the fire engine. In class we decided to make our own and we have had lots of fun making and playing in it!
This week we really enjoyed a tennis taster session. The coach even showed us how to do a magic trick!
This week we have been learning all about Harvest. We found out about where flour comes from to make the bread that we eat, and we even made our own bread. It was amazing seeing it rise to overflow the bowl and then seeing it cook in the oven. We all agreed it was delicious!
We’ve been learning how to programme a beebot! Our beebot was postman and had lots of mail to deliver to different places in the village… We’ve also been making a class book about our families.
This week’s story was Stick Man by Julia Donaldson. We had a lot of fun in the woods, hunting for natural materials to make our own stick men with.
It was very windy this week and we had great fun flying the kites we made! We’ve also enjoyed playing in the hospital role play area. Look at the fantastic ambulance we built!
