The sun has been shining on us this week in reception, and we are full of the joys of spring!

Reading sessions

Many thanks to the adults who have been able to come along to the Thursday reading sessions. These run each Thursday from 3:00-3:10. You are welcome to come in to the classroom to read, or take a book in the garden and read with your child. If you are unable to make it, please do not worry!

Phonics:

This week, groups are continuing to practise set 1 sounds, and learn some new set 2 sounds. When recapping sounds, we are adding extra challenge by incorporating some multi syllabic words (words with more than one syllable) and words with consonant blends such as blush (these blends such as b,l can be tricky).

We continue to read real and alien words within our RWI sessions, and we practise writing also. When we are writing, it is important for us to orally build and practise our sentences, to ensure we don’t forget what it is we are writing. This takes lots of practise.

Maths:

This week we started by learning how shapes are composed of other shapes such as 2 triangles put together to make a square. We explored lots of different ways of putting shapes together and drawing around them to find new shapes. We then had to decompose shapes that were given to us, by fitting shapes inside.

The rest of the week we practised repeating patterns. We used the food from The Hungry Caterpillar story to create patterns around the outside of shapes. This was tricky as we had to move our shape around to ensure our pictures were facing the correct way. We started with an AB pattern which is 2 things which repeat eg strawberry, apple, strawberry, apple and so on. We moved on to ABC eg pie, cheese, gherkin, pie, cheese, gherkin etc. Finally, we practised ABB patterns eg lollipop, ice cream, ice cream, lollipop, ice cream, ice cream etc.

Next week in maths we will start to measure and compare the mass, length and height using non-standard units of measure.

Topic:

In topic this week, we listened to the story The Hungry Caterpillar. We compared the stages of the story to the caterpillars we have in class, and learnt that we still have another week to wait until they come out of their chrysalides. We made our own lifecycle of a butterfly to show how they start as an egg, out pops a caterpillar, who goes into a chrysalis then comes out as a beautiful butterfly. We had a lesson on healthy and unhealthy foods, where we looked at what a healthy plate looks like. We discussed foods we need a lot of, and foods which we should only have as a treat occasionally. After this, we got to try some foods from the story including gherkins, salami and plums. The children were very adventurous, some trying and loving foods they’d never tried before! Finally, we rewrote the story of The Hungry Caterpillar. We needed to remember the things needed for a sentence-capital letter, finger spaces, fred fingers and full stop. We are becoming a lot more confident and independent in our writing which has been lovely to see.

Dates:

• TEAM AQUA parents - our sport day has moved from the Wednesday, to a Monday. Please can you send your child in with trainers and full uniform on a Monday as of next week please?
• Class photos will be on Monday 23^rd May.
• On Thursday 26th May, the kitchen are preparing special Jubilee themed menu and so the children are invited to come in to school wearing red, white and blue clothes in celebration.
• On Friday 27th May (the final day of term) we are holding our celebration event for our ‘Be Here, Be You, Belong’ project. This will be an informal event on the Key Stage Two playground where children will parade and show off some of their learning. We will start at 2:15 and parents are welcome to attend. If we could ask you to stand around the edges of the playground as this will be our staging area! We should be finished by 3:00 and then children will be dismissed from their classroom as usual so if you could allow them to leave the playground first to go back inside and get organised for home time, we would be grateful. We are hopeful that the weather is kind but if it does decide to rain, we will have to cancel unfortunately.

Many thanks for all of your support, from all the EYFS team!