Reception Newsletter

Reception had such a wonderful time last week at their Ugly Bug Ball. The children were joined by their Nursery friends and we held a garden party for all their families. Lots of cake was eaten, many cups of tea were consumed and prizes were won at the raffle. The children sang their hearts out in their Minibeast performances and they loved every minute. It was wonderful to see so many people there and we were lucky to raise lots of money for our Early Years.  A big thank you to everyone who came.   

In Maths, the children have been looking at shape, space and measure. We started by looking at the properties of 2d shapes and last week we moved on to weight. The children loved using the scales to see which items were heavier and lighter and had the challenge of trying to make the scales balance. We also introduced the language of shorter, longer, taller and thicker to describe playdough worms and towers made of cubes. 

    

In our RAW lessons, we have been looking at the Christian faith and focusing on churches. We looked at what churches traditionally have inside them and spent a lot of time looking at stained glass windows. The children then attempted to make their own stained glass windows out of tissue paper and laminate plastic. 

Reception Newsletter

We've had a lovely week back at school and the children have really enjoyed being introduced to their topic of minibeasts. We've had snails in class and the children have tried their hand at some impressive sketching! The children also made their own minibeasts out of playdough and made their own fascinating books about their favourite tiny creature.

 

For our Worldviews lesson this half term, we asked ourselves about our favourite weather and why. To really throw ourselves into the question, we took the children into the immersion room and they imagined they were in the desert! We turned the temperature up high and surrounded the children with pictures of the Sahara and then a completely different, cold scene, with lots of snow ice and put the air conditioning on high! The children spent ages talking about their favourite weathers and then went on to make some beautiful collage suns, researched weather by looking at non-fiction books and wrote about their favourite weather and why.  

Reception Newsletter 28.02

Reception have had a good first week back, where we started the week introducing the children to our new topic of 'transport'. The Reception role play areas have been changed to train stations and we have had lots of Brio play, alongside making their own vehicles in CIP and outside, we have two car washes and a roadside cafe to keep the children busy!

We had our second Worldviews lesson this week as well, which totally engrossed the children - mainly because of us beginning the lesson with a song from Encanto! This term we are looking at the importance of family as well as friends and the children imagined that their families had magical powers, like the ones in Encanto. Some of the examples of magic powers we had were a sister who ' has magic powers that pull herself up to standing' and 'when I feel sad, mummy has magic powers to stop me feeling bad'. We painted our families, read books all about different families and discussed different ways in which we help our families at home. 

Reception's first full week back!

It's been lovely having the children back in class and they've certainly come back to school with a wonderfully positive attitude. When we went in the forest this week, we discussed New Year's Resolutions and talked about ways in which we would like to better ourselves. The children were very open minded and we had such lovely answers like, 'I'd like to help mummy with the laundry at home' and 'I'm going to start putting things in the dishwasher more!'. Other children said they wanted to be able to do forward rolls this year and try hard with their drawings. It was a lovely conversation in the log circle. 

We also introduced the children to our new Worldviews lesson. This was a lovely afternoon, where the children discussed the importance of friendship and answered the question, 'What is a friend?'. We made a 'friendship recipe', played games with our friends, where we focused on sharing and we made paper chains of our friends.

Reception Newsletter: BIG questions!

 This week in Reception, we have been thinking about how to ask BIG questions! We first thought about what a question was, and how a question is asked when you want to find the answer to something. BIG questions are always very tricky to answer and take lots of thinking. This represents the beginning of our P4C (Philosophy for Children) journey at school!

Today, our enquiry followed a fun story all about animals
travelling on human transportation!

Following this story, Austin came up with our question to start our discussions, asking "Would an elephant be a good pet?"

"Well you would need a special elephant bed!" responded Nellie. 

Ralph quickly added "but that might break!"

Aidan added to Ralph's point by suggesting "if it's a grown up elephant, it might smash through the roof!"

After some suggestions that maybe a baby elephant might be a good pet instead, Zoe had another thought, saying "but babies grow to full size, to big children! Maybe a good pet would be a snake, or a dog! That would fit in your house!"

The children loved discussing this question and we all found that we had different ideas to contribute and could offer lots of different opinions and thoughts. 

Nursery Sports Day

This morning all our nursery children participated in Sports Day up on the field. We walked onto the field following the team flags and danced along to the music. They were amazing as they took part in javelin throwing, racket ball dribbling, egg and spoon races, throwing bean bags into hoops and jumping over the hurdles. They all worked together in their team colours supporting and cheering each other on as they waited patiently for their turn. We ended our EYFS sports day with some running races and every child tried their best, they had to run nearly the whole length of the field to get to the finish line where Mrs Rooney was waiting with their sticker. All the nursery staff are so proud of every child as they were such sporty stars this morning.  

How does your garden grow?

Thanks to all of your wonderful donations of seeds and plants, the children in Early Years have been working their green fingers this term! Through careful watering and monitoring, we have been able to gather our very first harvest!

We have picked the ripe strawberries, pulled up some rather unusual looking carrots (!) and even cut some lettuce and two huge heads of broccoli. We are excited to see our tomato and bean plants beginning to flower and are wondering what might be happening to our potatoes beneath the soil.

So that we were able to all benefit from the delicious fruits (and vegetables!) of our labour, we passed some of what we had picked to the school cooks to include in our dinners this week! The children are particularly excited to taste the broccoli.

Thank you all again to all the parents and carers for providing the seeds and plants for the Early Years planters. Your donations have provided us with rich, first hand learning and has given the EYFS garden a well loved patch of nature.

 

Butterflies in nursery

 Continuing from our topic all about animals, this week we have been reading the story 'The Hungry Caterpillar'. Related to the story we were lucky enough to have 5 chrysalis that were ready to change. One morning we came in and the butterflies had started to come out. By the end of the morning all 5 had made it out and were flying around their net. We carefully gave them some sugar water and a grape and some orange for them to drink. We continued during the week to read other stories about butterflies including information books which we all found very interesting. Then on Wednesday before the rain came we set the butterflies free. In the morning we walked up to the forest to release them and in the afternoon we went round near the trees next to the nursery building. It was amazing to see them fly away and one stayed for a long time having a drink on the grape so we could see how beautiful the butterfly really was. It was an amazing experience and the nursery children have really been enthusiastic when talking about them and thrilled to watch the butterflies fly away. 

Nursery super farm trip.

 This week we had an excellent day at nursery as a wonderful farm came to visit us at school.  We walked beautifully to the field and listened to the instructions that we can stroke and groom the animals with our kind hands. Many of the nursery children were so excited and loved having a turn at using a special brush to brush the pony or goats. Some children were even brave enough to hold the cockerel who was called Ralph! There was also a tiny foal with its mother who was drinking her milk and 2 lambs with their mother. At the end if the children chose to they were able to hold and stroke a rabbit whose fur was 'really soft'. When we had finished our turn we came back to nursery and washed our hands really well and had a lovely drink and snack. It was a great day and well done to all the nursery children who behaved brilliantly. 

There are lots of great photos to show you of our fun filled day.