Reception Highlights

The children have had an amazing term! They have now secured good relationships with friends and staff and are always ready to learn new things! We also celebrated our 101st day at school where we decorated ourselves as Dalmatians and took part in some fun activities like shopping and baking!

We have been busy reading our key texts in Talk for Writing, including ‘Supertato’ and ‘Handa’s Surprise’. Reception have been very creative with making up their own signs and actions to help them remember and read the story maps which have progressed their oral story telling skills. The children have also been able to extend their vocabulary associated with these texts and are applying it to their everyday play and writing. The children really enjoyed being on the lookout for the Evil Pea from Supertato and then they came up with their own innovated super villain! Recently, the children have been reading Handa’s Surprise where they revisited African animals and fruits such as mangoes and guavas. They changed the African animals and fruits in this story into Arctic animals and warm clothing to create their own version of the story!

In Maths, we began the term learning about height, length and distance. We took part in activities where we measured ourselves in height order and built towers of different heights. We put our origami skills to the test and made paper aeroplanes to fly; we then measured the distances they landed at, it was a lot of fun! The children have learnt how to use Numicon to find number bonds to 10. They have also looked at comparing two numbers to say if one is more or less than the other. Many of the children have been having a go at writing number sentences to reflect their understanding of number bonds. We have also revisited our learning of 2D shapes and have learnt more names and features of 3D shapes and linked them to shapes in our everyday lives such as a sphere football or a cuboid cereal box! As a link to our learning of Kenya, we have looked at Kenyan art patterns and made repeated patterns with different objects around the class!

In Topic, the children have been learning all about plants and Kenya. Reception have been busy planting seeds outdoors as well as indoors and investigating which elements they need to grow a healthy plant. The children know that plants need water, soil and sunlight to grow. We investigated whether plants such as cress seeds needed soil to grow by planting the seeds in cotton wool and we found out that we can indeed grow plants without soil! This week we have further investigated whether or not we need sunlight to grow plants. We have placed plants in three different locations in terms of lighting and are eagerly awaiting the results of their growth to see if our predictions were right! We had a special talk with Mrs Abdi from Year 2. She comes from Kenya and shared her knowledge about Kenyan food, activities and general life in such an amazing country which is also home to so many different kinds of food and animals!

We have enjoyed learning about the many festivals and celebrations that are taking place this month including Ramadan, Vaisakhi and Easter. Reception wishes you all a happy, healthy break and hope you enjoy all of your celebrations if you are celebrating!