Hill Top Primary Academy

In RE we have been looking at houses around the world and talking about what makes our homes special. We drew pictures of our own homes and made houses out of Lego.

Spring 2 - Our next topic was 'Toys'. We began by looking at Victorian Toys and identifying similarities and differences between the old and newer toys. We learnt about the transformation of toys over the past 100 years and brought our favourite toy in to share with the rest of the class. 

During the rest of the topic we learnt lots of other things such as, yoga in our PE lessons, Joshua's Mummy came to visit and told us all about helping people who are deaf and blind and then we finished our work by showing everyone else in school what we had been doing!

We went on our very first school trip to Harlow Carr! In the morning we explored the gardens and completed an 'I Spy' hunt before having a great time on the climbing equipment. In the afternoon, we took part in a literacy workshop focusing on the 'Stick Man' story - we followed his journey around the gardens and then made our own Stick Man to bring back to school!

We have looked at information from books and computers and used this to identify features such as labels and captions. We have learnt about our skeletons and the importance of having bones in our bodies - we then created our own skeletons! In Literacy, we read the 'Funny Bones' story and in PE we did a skeleton dance!

We have now started our new topic all about 'Our Bodies'. Over the coming weeks we will be looking at various different aspects such as our senses, our bones and our brains. To begin our topic we talked about the different parts of our bodies and had a go at labeling them!

Spring 1

Science day was so much fun!! We carried out a very exciting slime experiment! We tested the different amounts of the ingredients to make the slime stretch a variety of distances and thought of lots of WOW words to describe how the slime felt. As the morning went on we completed several challenges with partners; we created letters and numbers and counted how many times we could bounce and catch the slime. 

Our next stop on our 'Around the world' adventure was China and we even got to taste some noodles! We compared their capital city with ours and looked at some of their famous landmarks. In our Maths sessions, we created our own 'Great walls of Reception' and measured the length of them with cubes. We then did some measuring around the unit!

In our PE session, we learnt a variety of different dance moves to the South African world cup song. We worked in groups to put a sequence of moves together and then we performed them!

The first country we visited was South Africa! We looked at the differences and similarities between our country and theirs. We learnt lots of facts about the country and used these in our writing and role play. We visited table mountain, saw some of the 'Big 5' animals and looked at the different places you could live. 

Our first topic this half term is 'Around the World'. Before the holidays our interests had turned to aeroplanes and the different places we could travel to. We set up an aeroplane in our role play area and plan to visit lots of far away countries! Keep looking at our page to see where we have been next! 

Autumn 2

We made our own gold coins out of clay and then in the afternoon we set off on a treasure hunt! We had a go at reading our maps and worked with a partner to discuss our route. After finding several clues along the way we eventually found some treasure - 33 golden coins!

We have gone Pirate mad in Reception - lots of us decided to make maps so we could go on a hunt for treasure!!! For the past two weeks we have been learning all about pirates and we have had a fabulous time! 

We have looked at different pirate ships and learnt all about their features. We have created our own giant ship which we have used for lots of adventures in the role play area! 

We have designed and created our own pirate ships using a variety of materials and talked about why we chose to use certain materials to construct different parts. Please have a look below at our slideshow of all the things we have been doing in our Pirate topic!

Our topic continues this week with a pirate themed day on Wednesday 12th October!!

Owl Babies 26.09.2016

We really enjoyed the 'Owl Babies' story this week! We acted out the story and re told it with our peers. We then learnt about some different owls and remembered lots of facts about them. We now know where the snowy owl makes it's nest, what the great grey owl likes to eat and where the elf owl lives! We looked closely at the patterns and features of some owls and painted our own - everyone thinks they are brilliant!

26.09.2016 - Maths - 2D shapes and their properties

We have enjoyed learning about a variety of 2D shapes during this week and we have been very creative in the process! We used our measuring sticks to create different shapes and talk about the features of them, we used a computing program to design 2D pictures of different objects and we used lots of shapes in our sticking activity! 

We have enjoyed using the animals in our small world areas and we have done lots of activities surrounding this. In Literacy, we read Giraffes Can't Dance - which we loved! We created our own representations of Gerald the Giraffe and thought of lots of describing words for him. 

 We have all settled into Reception and have enjoyed our first few weeks exploring our new classroom with lots of new friends. We have been getting to know each other and finding out about our similarities and differences. 

Autumn 1

Towards the end of our 'Toys' topic we had a challenge to design and make our own toy! Some of us worked in groups and others worked independently. We had great fun designing, choosing materials and evaluating our methods! We then used our toys in our play!

The next focus in our topic was Teeth! We had a lovely visit from a dentist called Mr O Donovan who taught us lots of facts about teeth and how we can keep them healthy. He also gave us a special toothbrush to take home!

On Wednesday 23rd November we had a Literacy day in Early Years and invited our parents/grandparents and carers in to our class to complete some literacy challenges with us. 

We made apple and cheese pirate ships with Mrs Hudson! We had learnt lots about pirate ships so we enjoyed sharing our facts with each other. We also tried really hard to improve our cutting skills!

We have been matching different amounts of objects to numerals to 10 - in lots of different places!