This Week’s Learning

Week commencing Monday 27th January

Happy Chinese New Year!

This week was all about Chinese New Year, and how people around the world celebrate this festival. We made fans, lanterns, dragons, and learned all about the Great Race – The children know all the animals in the Chinese zodiac now! Ask them who won the race, and what year it is this year! We also tried different sauces used in Chinese cuisine, tallying them up to see which sauce was the class favourite. We were also so lucky to have parent visitors come in to tell the children another Chinese New Year tale, which lent greatly to our Lion Dancing!

In Phonics, Miss Hallstrom’s group were working hard on recognising and using their double consonants. They are now experts – They know a lot of words with them in it! Miss Cuvelier’s group worked on another difficult sound – This week was all about ‘c’, ‘k’ and ‘ck’, and recognising them in different words. We have tried to come up with tricks and stories to help us remember as well! Mrs Mara’s group have continued to work on writing their own names, but they have also started to look at different words that have their initial sounds in it – ‘sat’, ‘pat’, ‘pin’ and much more. 

In Maths this week, we have looked at the meaning of 0 – zero. The children are very confident with all the words that mean zero – nothing, nada, none, all gone… You name it! Towards the end of the week, we continued looking at number bonds to 5. This time we played a variety of interactive games such as bean bag throwing, as well as sang a favourite – 5 little speckled frogs. We used the part whole model, as well as the 5s frames, to show the different bonds that we know and remember.

For indoor PE, Gymnastics was all about balancing. The balancing beams ranged from thin to thick, and the children were challenged in taking turns, being safe, as well as giving everything a go. They absolutely loved it – Especially when they could do it on their own, with us holding their hands. For outdoor PE, we worked on our multiskills and foot coordination. But we also took the opportunity to get the Lion out for our Lion dancing 🙂

The Wild Life Garden was especially fun this week, as we were allowed to help Mr. Roberts dig in one of the plots. We had to dig really deep – Our hard work paid off when we struck gold! We found so many Jerusalem Artichokes! We talked about what they looked like and what they might taste like, and have decided that we would make a soup with it and try it out. We can’t wait!

Next week, in Phonics, Miss Hallstrom will be focusing on double consonants. Miss Cuvelier will continue focusing on difficult sounds such as all the ‘h’, ‘f’ and a very common tricky two sounds ‘b’ and ‘d’ (it’s going to be another hard one!). Mrs Mara will continue with the next level of initial sounds. In Maths, we will be digging even deeper with our number bonds and hone in on using a variety of representations, such as our part-whole models and our 5s frames, to help us explain our understanding. Next week, we will also start properly introducing our Reception text – ‘Blue Penguin’. Again, please don’t start reading it with them as we always start with a slow-reveal to help the children explore their vocabulary and knowledge beforehand!

Have a great weekend 🙂

The Reception Team

Dates for your diary:

February 3 2020 – Parent Reading Morning

February 10 2020 – Children’s Exhibition Morning

N.B.

Reading Eggs and Mathletics is now available for your children! As mentioned in our Curriculum Meeting back in September, you will be able to find both login details at the back of their Reading logs. If you have any questions at all, please do let us know.

This Half Term’s Learning

Reception Spring 2020 First Half Term Information