We are on the move again - this week to China, to celebrate Chinese New Year! We learnt the story of Nian and the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. Now we know what this year's animal is - why don't you ask us! Then we made paper dragons, red lanterns and fireworks in a jar. Outside, we learnt how to write Chinese numerals from one to ten and used them to play hopscotch. We took our dragon masks and long scarves into PE to do beautiful dragon dancing to a special song - it was so good, we let Mrs O'Brien watch and she was very impressed!

As part of learning about the world around us, this week everyone in Reception went to Egypt! We met Bedouin people, who travel across the desert taking everything they need with them - such a different way of life than ours. We had a go at constructing Bedouin tents, compared the weather in the desert with our seasons here and looked at what the Bedouin wear. We had fun making and eating Bedouin flatbreads (delicious), and made special Bedouin tea as well. Then we learnt lots of facts about camels and why they are so well-suited to living and working in the dry desert. Ask us a camel fact this weekend! 

We have had a fantastic week in Reception. The children really enjoyed their Christmas dinner on Wednesday and their Christmas pantomime 'The Greediest Elf' on Thursday. This week we have also been making Christmas biscuits and icing them. All of the children have settled well and had a great first term in Reception. We hope you have a lovely Christmas holiday.

This week we have been learning the sounds sh, th, ng and nk. In P.E. the children pretended they were astronauts and Moon walked through hoops and pulled themselves along on a bench pretending they were moving around the International Space Station. One of the Rainbow Challenge pieces was hidden in a padlocked box and the children had to solve 4 addition number sentences to open the lock and find their piece, everyone had fun trying to open the lock. For the red challenge we wrote down some facts about space and any planets the children could think of.

This week we continued our phonics looking at v, w, x and y.  The children had a great time mixing colours with a focus on making green, orange, purple and then brown. We then looked at some leaves from our Sheen Common walk and painted some trees with some autumn coloured leaves. After this we changed to our new topic of space and started learning about the Sun and the Moon.

This week in phonics we have covered the phonemes h, b, f and l. It was great to hear the fun things that had happened over the half-term holiday. The children have enjoyed ordering and weighing all of the pumpkins and vegetables that you kindly sent in, they liked looking at the difference in all of their sizes. Everyone enjoyed hammering golf tees into the pumpkins.