Welcome to Reception!
Staff in Reception this year are:
Mrs Cundall and Mrs Spencer
Monday afternoons: Mrs Secker, Mrs Spencer and Ms Nicoll
Our P.E. day this half term is Tuesday
Essential Letters and Sounds - Oxford Owl (Support for parents with Phonics)
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.
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!
