It has been a hot and fun last week in Reception. We have spent much of the time trying to stay cool!
We have enjoyed the last swimming sessions for the year, and we are looking forward to continuing these in Year 1.
You have been amazing in Reception! Thank you for all of your hard work, we wish you a very happy summer and good luck next year!
This week we have turned our minibeast focus to the school pond and we have learnt about lots of aquatic creatures. Some of the amazing things we found include young newts, dragonfly larvae, pond snails and ramshorn snails. Mrs Newman found the case of a dragonfly larva so we could look at it really closely. We finished our minibeasts topic by sketching a spider in our special art books that we will keep throughout our time at Sheen Mount - we used the observational skills we have been practising this term to do beautifully accurate drawings. The most exciting thing this week was finding out about our new classrooms, meeting new teachers and seeing what it's like being in Year 1. The teachers were all so impressed at how we behaved when we became Moles, Hedgehogs and Otters for a few hours!
What a busy week we've had in Reception! To start with, we did some in-depth study of ants, those amazing superorganisms - did you know they live everywhere in the world except Antarctica? We looked at how they live and work, and learnt about their life-cycles. In phonics, we are practising longer words in phonics, focusing on the endings in particular, so we are getting very good at writing 'bees' not 'beez' and 'painted' instead of 'paintid'! In maths we are starting to learn about 'sharing' amounts, and we can practise this in our play by sharing out food in pretend picnics. As well as all this, we have been enjoying all the Reception assemblies (they were so good!) and practising hard for Sports Day. We will be tired this weekend!
This week our minibeast focus is on SPIDERS! We have learnt lots of interesting facts - did you know that the female spiders are often bigger than the male ones? Our book for the week has been The Very Busy Spider and we have used this to study how the spider lives and how amazing their webs are. It is helping us with our number bonds to eight as well! In our phonics, we are tackling longer words now, and this week we have been concentrating on the endings of words, such as -ed, -d and -ing. We are getting into the swing of swimming every week, and also fitting in time to rehearse our class assemblies AND practise activities for Sports Day! On top of this, we amazed our teachers with our dance moves and super behaviour at the disco on Thursday. Thank you parents for organising this!
Hello! This week we are learning about bees! We have found out so many facts about them - we know now that lots of bees DON'T make honey! We know so many minibeast facts that we have been using our artistic talents to make pictures of beautiful settings for all our minibeasts, then completing observational drawings to add to them. Our phonics are so good now that we wrote FANTASTIC information in our Golden Books all by ourselves. What with our swimming and practising our class assemblies, we have been as busy as bees doing a waggle dance!
This week our minibeast focus is on snails and slugs! We have shared lots of information and stories about these interesting molluscs, and now we have learnt so much more. Ask us about how a snail can see and smell! How does it have babies? We have used the snail shells as inspiration for some spectacular spiral artwork, and then we read our focus story, Snail Trail, and used that to give us some great ideas for our own 'snail trail' journey, exploring positional language to direct our snails around obstacles. We looked at shapes in our maths this week, for example learning how to use small squares to make big squares. Also, we have used our best writing to make a card... but we can't tell you about that yet!
This week we welcome the summer and jump straight into our new topic looking at all creatures small and smaller - minibeasts! This meant going outside to see what we could find and recording our results with a tally chart - we found a lot of snails! We have impressed our teachers by what we already know, and now we are finding out lots more, beginning with caterpillars and butterflies. Did you know that caterpillars only have six 'true' legs? Our study of The Very Hungry Caterpillar has prompted some great discussions about healthy food, and now we are looking at butterflies really carefully to learn about symmetry. We are reading and hunting for lots of words with four sounds in phonics, and learning subtraction facts in our maths.
In Reception this week we have been looking at the Enormous Turnip and performing to the class. The children have enjoyed adapting the story with their own vegetables and fruit. The story was great for comparing the sizes of different objects and characters. Over the last couple of days we have been in preparation for our Platinum Jubilee celebrations. We have been making crowns (lots of glitter and stickers!) and drawing a portrait of the Queen in our brand new Sheen Mount sketch books. Dressing up has been fun and the food at the picnic was tasty!
This week our Traditional Tale is Goldilocks and the Three Bears and we have been retelling the story using puppets, songs and some very good expression! We also built chairs to replace Baby Bear's broken chair, and tested them out with bears in class. The story has helped with our phonics as we are now learning new endings to words, such as 'softest', 'hardest', 'jumping' and 'running'. Outside, we decided the weather was good enough to move our amazing sunflower seedlings into the growing area and we are now thinking about ways to keep them safe from all the animals that also like to use our playground! So far, we are hoping the net and the scarecrows will work. Wish us luck!
We are continuing to look at Traditional Tales as our topic in reception. The children have been looking at the Gingerbread Man and The Three Little Pigs. Everyone has loved learning all of the different stories and re-telling them with the finger puppets we have been making. We all made some fantastic houses and Mr Brooks (The Big Bad Wolf) took great pleasure when he came over to try and knock them all down with his leaf blower, the children found this very exciting. The children have been very interested in planting and they are starting to see the sunflowers creep out from the soil.
This week, we started our new topic of 'Traditional Tales from Around the World'. We began by seeing what the children already knew about the topic and then we read the 'Little Red Hen'. We focused on re-telling the story and used actions to help the children remember the order of the story. The children have been making some lovely puppets to then perform different stories in our puppet theatre role-play area. In maths, we have been continuing to look at number bonds and doubling. We used Snow White's magic mirror to double objects, the children enjoyed this activity.
We have learnt lots of things about Spring, and this week we saw how the weather can change - last week, sun hats and shorts, this week, woolly hats and gloves! We checked temperatures and talked about all the different types of weather that make up Spring - what an interesting season it is. To finish up our dinosaur topic, we wrote and talked about all the new things we had learnt - children and teachers! There are definitely some budding palaeontologists at Sheen Mount. Our Easter preparations included making an Easter basket with some delicious 'nests' and equally delicious eggs inside them. Then we did Easter Egg hunts in the playground - we found every single egg, even when it started snowing... We have whizzed through our phonics and completed all of Phase 3, impressing our teachers with the tricky words, digraphs and trigraphs we now know. Bring on Phase 4 - but let's have a holiday first!
