Welcome to Reception!
Staff in Reception this year are:
Mrs Cundall and Mrs Spencer
Monday afternoons: Mrs Secker, Mrs Spencer and Mrs Noble
Our P.E. day this half term is Tuesday
Essential Letters and Sounds - Oxford Owl (Support for parents with Phonics)
Spring 2: Celebrations in our wonderful world!
This half-term we are exploring the wonderful variety of celebrations across the world.
We will be learning about:
Art Day, World Book Day, St David's Day, Pancake Day, International Maths Day, St Patrick's Day, Red Nose Day, Mother's Day, Easter, Ramadan, Chinese New Year, Holo, Pesach, Vaisakhi and Eid Ul-Fitr.
Spring 1: Adventure is out there!
We have started our topic off with learning about the solar system and everything in it. We are really enthusiastic about our learning and have learnt the names of the planet and the order they are in from the sun.
On the snowy, icy days we have explored the ice and thought about how this is like Neptune. We have also enjoyed our new topic of gymnastics in PE, and learning one more and one less than.
We are focusing on scissor skills this half term and have done lots of cutting activities to help us become independent.
Science: Shadows
As part of our Lunar new year and Space work, we have enjoyed experimenting with shadows. We made shadow puppets and worked hard to get their shadows to show up clearly on a smooth surface. We discussed about changing the colour of the puppet to see if it would change the colour of the shadow, and how moving the puppet further away and closer to the torch made it appear bigger or smaller.
Papier Mache planets!
Lots of us have REALLY enjoyed getting messy and making papier mache to create the 8 planets. We haven't painted them yet so watch this space for the final product!
The Smeds and the Smoos
The Smeds and the Smoos has been one of our favourite stories so far and it inspired so many creative ideas. We explored mixing paint to create new colours and new smoo-smeds, just like the purple smoo-smed in the story! We learnt about primary colours and how these can be mixed to create a new colour.
We didn't really approve of Grandfather Smed and Grandmother Smoo's ideas of not being allowed to play with people who look different to ourselves.
Some wonderful quotes were:
"You can play with anyone, even if they have different hair or eyes to you."
"They should be all allowed to play with everyone, that's what good friends do."
"It's not fair to stop somebody playing with someone else just because you're not the same."
Geography: Signs
This morning we enjoyed some Geography work looking at different types of signs and their purposes. We shared some fantastic ideas about the signs we have seen around our local area. Arthur said he had seen a sign for a bus stop. Emmy said she has seen a sign for a chocolate shop and Charlie said he has signs at his swimming pool to keep people safe. We discussed how signs have different purposes: information, instruction or direction. We then went to investigate the types of sign in our school and took photos of what we found.
We talked about the blue ‘danger’ sign and agreed that a danger sign would be better in red, as red shows danger. We even had Eesa suggest to use an exclamation mark as this would mean we had to shout it!
After all of this excitement we made our own signs to show the new nursery children where our favourite parts of EYFS were, and how to play here. We had great fun sticking them up! Some signs may have made it home in book bags too. Neave made a lovely sign for her little sister for when she starts walking to show her not to go up the stairs!
Well done everyone!
Chinese New Year!
To develop our understanding of the world, this week we are learning about Chinese New Year! We enjoyed the story of the zodiac race very much and learnt that we were born in the year of the pig or the rat. We also learnt that this year is the year of the snake. We have enjoyed making our own snakes and using chop sticks to develop our fine motor skills.
Following instructions: Drawing Videos
We were quiet as mice this afternoon as everyone was really concentrating on following the drawing video with their own pens and wipe boards to create a space man!
Access art: Galaxy Paintings
We have spent 3 weeks of art lessons putting together our galaxy paintings using a range of mediums. We used pipettes to splatter paint to create stars and then smudged chalk to blur the colours into planets.
Christmas in Reception!
On the 1st of December Christmas arrived in Reception! We have each taken turns to decorate the tree with a special bauble either from home, or one that we have made in class. It was a lovely festive afternoon listening to Christmas music and getting in the Christmas spirit!
The reindeer run!
What a wonderful morning we had chasing Santa and his elf for the reindeer run! Everyone had very big smiles and even bigger antlers today to raise as much money as we can for Wakefield Hospice. Thank you for your support in this.
This week reception each wrote a letter to Santa, stuck on a stamp and then walked to the post box to post it all the way to the North Pole! We had to use our very best Phonics to make sure that Santa and his elves could work out what we would like for Christmas.
Everyone made sure their stamp was in the correct corner of the envelope so that Santa's helpers could get it to the North Pole in time.
Our Christmas Show!
Reception have worked exceptionally hard to remember their lines and where they need to be on stage to put together the BEST nativity ever! We are so proud of everyone and I'm sure our parents and visitors to the show agreed, we were brilliant.
We have really enjoyed learning the story of the first Christmas and recognise all of the characters in the story. Here are some photos of us in our costumes before the show.
Autumn 2: Once Upon A Time
We are starting our first week back in Autumn 2 with a 'celebrations week' where we will be learning about the celebration of Diwali, Bonfire Night and finally the way we commemorate soldiers on remembrance day.
Diwali: We enjoyed joining the whole-school assembly to learn about how Diwali is celebrated. We then learnt some more about Diya lamps, Rangoli patterns and how special feasts and cleaning the house is very important. We made our own Rangoli patterns to place at the entrance to our classroom to bring us luck. Some of us had a go at using clay to mold our own Diya lamps. We added sequins to make them shine, as this is the festival of lights!
Bonfire night: Today we created a giant bonfire picture using sticks, leaves and coloured paper. We added fireworks using pip-pets which was lots of fun! We learnt about Guy Fawkes and why bonfire night is celebrated and then how to stay safe around fireworks, bonfires and sparklers. We ended the day up making breadstick sparklers which were VERY tasty!
We began our commemorations for Remembrance Day today by making poppies to decorate our classroom door with. Lots of us made our own poppies to wear as a sign of respect for the soldiers who had been very brave for us. We are looking forward to seeing memorials, like the cenotaph, on our TVs on Sunday morning.
We have loved reading Goldilocks and the three bears, especially making our own porridge! We compared sizes and sorted things into large, medium or small using our comparative language. We had a great time using the bears in our small-world area and retelling the story during choosing time.
We are expert story-tellers and have loved joining in to tell the story of the Three Little Pigs together as a class! We had some fantastic actors who were brilliant at coming onto the ‘stage’ and acting out the story in front of our audience. The confidence of our class is fantastic and we were all so proud of each other.
Children in need! We made our own spotty Pudsey Bear ears, went on a teddy bear hunt and challenged ourselves to do silly things in a minute!
Autumn 1: AMAZING ME!
This half term we have been incredibly busy learning the new routines and expectations for Reception. Our first few weeks in school were full of smiles and learning about our new friends and work. We have started our Phonics lessons with ELS and are enjoying how this is opening so many doors for us as we are now all reading our own books! As part of our first topic we are all enjoying sharing facts about ourselves and the people we live with. We have shared our likes and dislikes, things we are proud of ourselves for, who is in our family and what makes us happy. It has been lovely to see the children grow in confidence in sharing with the class each week and learn about each other. We have spent lots of time discussing how we are all different, and how this makes us uniquely special. We have interwoven this with learning about Hill Top's 5C values and are looking to see if we can identify the values in school. This week we made each other certificates for the 5+s and enjoyed giving them to our friends. We had to write our own names, and our friends using good pencil control and posture at the table.
We have particularly enjoyed this week’s maths lessons on shape, space and measure, particularly the capacity lessons where we talked about which container would be most suitable for different sized objects. The final part of the lesson was to investigate which container we fit in, using the correct mathematical vocabulary. We had lots of fun climbing into different boxes as you can see!
Please look out for the following Harder to Read and spell word bookmarks in your children’s book bags.
Autumn learning!
Reception have created a tuff tray filled with autumn things from their weekend walks. We are enjoying looking for the signs of autumn and getting creative in class.
R.E.
This half term Reception have enjoyed learning about Christianity and Islam. We have shared special groups that we each belong to and special objects we have at home. We followed this by finding out about the special texts for Christians and Muslims and how these are respected and cared for.
Repeating Patterns
We have enjoyed copying, continuing and making our own repeating patterns this week. Take a look at some of them here!
All Around the World Day! 18th October
On Friday we learned about the country of Italy as part of our Around the World day! We learned how to say hello in Italian, where Italy is on the map and what it looks like, the food Italy is famous for, the religion that is dominant and finally we looked at, and built, lots of famous landmarks. We had competitions to build the tallest leaning tower of Pisa using spaghetti and fruit hoops which was very funny! For snack we each had Italian breadsticks alongside our usual fruit, which was a big highlight for most of us! We ended the day by having a parade with our flags and reading Pinocchio!
