Hill Top Primary Academy

Welcome to Reception!

Reception teacher: Mrs Cundall

Staff working in Reception: Miss Jones and Mrs. Spencer

Our P.E. day this term is Wednesday. Library books will be changed every Friday.

Spring term in Reception

Our class mascot, Nemo, is travelling on an around-the-world trip with one of our very kind grandparents. Nemo is sending us lots of lovely letters and photos of his journey and the places he is visiting and we are tracking him by moving his picture on our handmade class map! We are excited to find out where he is visit next!

Spring 2: Wonderful World

This half term we are exploring the Geography of our wonderful world through maps, atlases and online mapping systems. We have plotted the locations of our holidays on the class world map and have enjoyed comparing what was similar and different between the countries we visited. We are very lucky to have a well-travelled class! We are learning the names of the 7 continents and have painted these on a class map. We are using our phonics to write their names too!

In P.E. we are enjoying a new unit of 'games'. We are enjoying the change from gymnastics and learning new skills.

Geography: Fieldwork Study of the local area

Reception have been excellent Geographers and have conducted their own enquiry-led fieldwork study. We first had to learn about the term, 'local' and what this meant to us. We considered what was in our local area and what was missing. We then used this to think about the problems our local area had an how it could be improved. We thought of lots of ideas including, ''Are there enough flowers in our local area?, and 'do we have enough shops?'. Reception then used democracy to select the enquiry they wanted to answer and the winning enquiry was, 'Is there too much traffic in our local area?'

We decided that to find out if there was too much we would need to count the vehicles that passed our school. We conducted a traffic survey across different times of day to find out how many vehicles there were. Reception chose 100 as the total that would class as 'busy'. We collated our data and looked at it in a bar graph before making a final decision about the traffic.

We are now thinking of ways to reduce the traffic in our local area and how we can inform people about these. Look out for our posters around school soon!

Spring 1: Adventure is out there
During the first two weeks back at school have enjoyed learning about astronauts and adventures into space. We have learnt about the 8 planets and the sun, famous astronauts, the international space station and rockets. We have enjoyed writing lists of things we would take to space, painting planets by mixing colours, chalking the night sky, painting galaxies using water colours, learning about meteors and ordering the planets.
We have enjoyed reading, ‘Look Up!’ alongside our non-fiction texts about space. We each created a poster for a meteor shower, just like the ones in the story! We also built our own rockets to travel into space in and sat in them ready for blast off.

We moved our learning onto different forms of transport and enjoyed amongst other books, The Naughty Bus. We created our own Naughty Bus story by taking our own photographs of the bus around school. We worked together to write the story in a giant 'Reception Naughty Bus' book!

Autumn term in Reception

Autumn 1: Amazing Me!

What makes me me?

Being a good friend

Starting school

We have enjoyed learning about growth mindset and resilience this week and have read two gorgeous books called, ‘The Dot’ Andy ‘Beautiful Oops’. We created our own pictures by closing our eyes are drawing wiggly lines, turning them into something beautiful from something that wasn’t on purpose. We spent the week learning the importance of the word ‘yet’ and how adding this magic word to something we think we cannot do can help us to improve. We each drew and labelled something we are not good at yet, and thought about what we can do to get better. We finally created a ‘dot’ art gallery using all different types of dotty art. We invited teachers to come and view our wonderful work. What a busy week!

This week we are reading a really lovely story about families. We have discussed how our families are different to each others and how families can live in different houses and even different countries! We have shared how our families make us feel and the things we like to do together. Our family photos are on display in the cloakroom and we are enjoying looking at each others' and noticing things about each other that is the same and different to ourselves. We are making family trees this week and have spent lots of time using our Phonics 'm' and 'd' to help us write 'mum' and 'dad'. We have also made lollipop homes for our families and drawn who lives with us in our family.

Super Duper You! We have talked about what makes each of us super and how we are all good at different things and find different things easy and difficult. We were invited to bring in something from home that we are super at to share with our friends in class. We each took turns to stand at the front of the class and tell everyone what we are good at. We learnt lots about one another and had some very good questions to ask. It was so super to see how much amazing talent we have in Reception!

It’s now our second full week in school and we are all settling into our new routines well. We have enjoyed reading the stories, ‘The Colour Monster goes to school,’ and ‘The Colour Monster’ amongst lots of other favourites.

We are learning how to identify our own emotions and what to do when we feel angry or sad, and how to help others, and ourselves, to feel happy. We have looked at facial expressions of each emotion and drawn pictures of what makes us feel different emotions. We have also being busy making beautiful artwork for the walls of our classroom by creating our very own colour monsters! They are for lots of different emotions including: love, frustration, happiness, sadness and hunger!

Autumn 2: Once Upon a Time

This half term we have enjoyed reading a range of traditional tales and stories. We began with Goldilocks and the Three Bears and then continued with The Gingerbread Man and The Three Little Pigs. We have enjoyed learning these stories and have done lots of role-play, small world and writing about them. We have also enjoyed exploring the ice as the weather has turned colder and read many wintery books including Stick Man, Penguin Huddle and Lost and Found.

In our Maths this half term we have learnt about the properties of triangles and circles, numbers 1-5 and shapes with 4 sides. We are doing really well at subitising numbers and recognising different representations of these numbers.