This week in the classroom
Friday 12th July
Reception have had a lovely week, following our beach theme. We've described another character from the book, Splash, and written about what they like to do. Our letter formation is improving so much, we are getting great at using finger spaces and we know that we need a full stop at the end. We're now learning to use tricky word cards to help us to remember how to spell words such as: she, he and like that don't follow our phonics rules.
On Tuesday, in Personal, health and social education we watched a short video about 'Why we need to be Good' it gave examples of a boy who made bad choices and good choices and talked about how it made him and those around him feel. We agreed that we feel good if we make good choices and we understood that it made others feel good too. As a team, we made some rules to help us make good choices. One of them was about not bringing toys from home to school. Thank you for helping us with this, it has made a big difference.
We've also learnt about the seaside in the past this week. We spotted similarities and differences to the seaside in the present. We were amazed by the old-fashioned swimming costumes and by how people went to the beach fully dressed. Lots of us had been to a pier and we were fascinated to learn that they had been built so long ago.
This we received our reward for all the tokens we have earned - a picnic. We've been getting ready asking doing surveys to find out what fillings our friends wanted and writing shopping lists. On Thursday, we made our own picnic. Sadly, the rain meant we picnicked inside but that didn't stop us from enjoying the delicious sandwiches we had made and being proud of having made them all by ourselves. We sliced bread, spread our topping. Ask us if we choose jam, ham or cheese?
Friday 5th July
Reception has been continuing our beach theme based on 'Splash - Anna Hibiscus'. In literacy we have ordered the story and retold it orally. We have then been writing our own zig-zag books telling the story in short captions. We love being authors.
In maths, we have been honing our subitising skills spotting numbers to 5 without counting and finding 5 and a bit to help us to spot numbers to 10 without counting too. We have been introduced to rekenreks (2 rows abacus) which help us to visually see the composition of number . This week we have been focussing on the basic skills of using a rekenrek, how to get it ready and how to move upto 5 beads in one smooth move without counting. Rekenreks will be used right upto Year 2 to help us to see the patterns in our maths so these are very important skills to embed.
We've worked alot with paint this week, learning about colouring mixing. We started with a simple exercise taking one primary colour and mixing in small dots of another primary colour making a fresh smear of paint each time to see how the colours changes. We were amazed by how red and blue moved through purple and how yellow and blue crept through green. We've also made ice cream cones using damp cotton wool pads where we have dotted them with different colour paints and seen how the colours merge. When they are dry we'll be adding cones and sprinkles.
On Friday we went into the forest for a bear hunt. We loved listening to the story and then reenacting it. We found swishy swashy grass, a river and eventually a bear! But we weren't scared! It was so much fun! We love spending time in the forest!