St John the Baptist CE VA Primary School Reception

Making storm music! On listening to Sibelius’s masterpiece Finlandia, we decided it sounded like a crashing storm. We have been creating our own storm music using graphic scores to stand for body percussion or instrumental sounds.

How long is your foot? After finding a giant’s foot print in our classroom, we set out to measure our own feet. We learned that you can measure with anything, as long as each piece is the same length.

Our new role play area is a Puppet Theatre! We voted for this, and are now enjoying lots of story telling.

This week, we looked at the book ‘The Tiger who Came to Tea’, by Judith Kerr. Of course, for any tea party it’s important to make cakes. So, we followed a photo recipe, balanced ingredients with each other, and made our cakes! They were delicious.

Reception decided they wanted to make a zoo. Here we are, using the tuff spot and craft materials to create enclosures for our animals!

We’ve had some more special visitors! Mrs Collins brought in her lovely boxer dog Bill, and Mr Nicholson let us keep his tortoise Alan for a whole day! We have been learning about how to handle different types of pets, and how to keep them healthy. We also talked about how to be safe around dogs when out and about.

What a busy week we’ve had, learning all about Chinese New year, and showing our learning in our class Collective Worship! We have made drums, learned and performed a dragon dance (even creating its head!), painted good luck messages in Chinese characters, eaten noodles with chopsticks and lots more!

We’ve been discovering the school beebots, and finding out how to programme them. We realised that machines will do exactly what we tell them to! We’ve been using them to reinforce our knowledge of numbers as well.

What a lovely way to start our ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ topic – a visit from Columbo the rabbit! We learned about how to look after a rabbit, and we had a chance to stroke and feed him. We really enjoyed getting to know him, and we wish he could have stayed to become part of our role play pet shop!

We’ve been learning about how our post system works, and playing in our roleplay post office, to finish off our ‘People who help us’ topic.  Here we are on our way to post our letters to Father Christmas! We hope he gets them in time.

Our Christmas Cactus is flowering!

Lots of us had a go at drawing our school’s lovely Christmas cactus this week. Some chose felt tip, some colour pencil, and some used oil pastels.

Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue came to visit us! Reception had a chance to sit in the cab, see equipment demonstrated and have a go with the hose. It has led to lots of fire fighter role play with the big construction outside! A big thank you to the fantastic firefighters.

We have been exploring the Hindu celebration of Diwali. We made pinch pots from clay, and have decorated them using clay tools, paint and glitter. We are going to light them all in the classroom and imagine what it must have been like for Rama and Sita on their way home in the dark with candles shining out!

After a class vote, we decided to turn our role play area into a Police Station! Here we are, creating a list of the evidence found at a crime scene (and practicing spelling cvc words while we’re at it!)

Reception have been exploring 2D shapes. How many sides and corners can you see on these shapes in front of us?

In maths, we’ve been exploring how to represent numbers in different ways. What can you see?

This week, we were learning all about Harvest, and we looked at the traditional tale of the Little Red Hen, who grew wheat and made bread. Then, we made our own bread! We all agreed it was absolutely delicious.

We are getting very good at spelling!

Reception enjoyed a ‘Come and Play’ session this week, where we had the chance to show our parents round our classroom. We played in the doctor’s surgery, made skull masks, showed our parents how to spell words with magnetic letters and made mud pies in the mud kitchen! Great fun was had by all.

Dem bones, dem bones. As part of our ‘All About Me’ topic, Reception are reading Funny Bones by Janet and Allen Ahlberg, and we’ve been learning about our own skeletons. Many of us chose to create our own life size chalk skeleton drawings! Beware if you come down to visit reception…

The children in Reception enjoyed their first visit to Forest School on Thursday afternoon. They played One, Two, Three Where Are You, collected some Autumn treasures and explored our wood, climbing the trees and building with the logs.

We’ve been working on repeating patterns, and what better way to learn than through food! Have a look at one of our fruit kebabs – can you spot what should come next?

Welcome to our new Reception class! We have spent lots of time exploring our classroom this week and getting to know each other. Have a look at the tracks we’ve made for our toy cars from the outdoor construction materials.