Last week of Reception
Wow, the last week of Reception, how is that here already? We’ve spent this week talking about our favourite experiences and memories from across the year. Plus, the exciting things we have to look forward to in Year 1.
We had our beach party which included a visit from the ice cream van and we all got to choose an ice cream.
A huge thank you as well to all the parents and carers for your support throughout the year. Have a wonderful summer, whatever you get up to. Stay safe, be healthy and be happy.
Best wishes
The Reception Team
Year 1
As your child comes to the end of their Reception year and gets ready for the exciting move into Year 1, we thought it would be helpful to share our home learning guide. We hope you find the information useful as you prepare for this next stage of your child’s learning journey.
Reception Round-Up: The Penultimate Week
This week, we have been making the most of the sunny weather by learning outdoors in the cooler mornings before continuing our activities inside during the warmer afternoons.
- We revisited our sun safety learning, talking about:
- wearing hats to protect our heads
- applying sun cream
- drinking plenty of water
- finding shade when we get too hot.
- Outside, the children enjoyed creating magical potions, cooling off with water play and making imaginative creations in the mud kitchen.
- We incorporated loose parts such as cardboard tubes into our role play, transforming them into telescopes, robot arms and many other imaginative creations.
Maths
We have been consolidating our automatic recall of number facts within 5 through games, songs and practical activities. The children practised recognising small groups of objects and using what they know about numbers. We revisited the well-known rhyme, Five Speckled Frogs, to help us think about numbers in different ways. For example, if 2 frogs were on the log, the children knew that 3 must be in the pond.
For this week’s maths challenge, the children used a one-minute timer to see how many times they could complete different activities, such as writing their name or doing star jumps. This helped them to understand how long one minute lasts while practising counting and comparing their results.
Phonics
This week, we reviewed our previous learning from Little Wandle Phases 3 and 4, revisiting sounds, tricky words and practising reading and writing words and sentences with increasing confidence.
During our reading challenge, the children searched for tricky words in books and enjoyed spotting and reading familiar words independently.
Reminders
- Please continue to send your child to school every day with a named sun hat and water bottle.
- Rainbow Class will have their final swimming session next week.
- If you still have any school library books at home, we would be very grateful if you could return them next week.
Next week is our final week of the school year. We are looking forward to enjoying our last few days together, reflecting on everything the children have achieved in Reception!
Snail and The Whale
Snail and The Whale
This week we have been sharing this much loved Julia Donaldson story. The children have been retelling the story and we have been discussing the rich vocabulary.
Help at home: You could share some other Julia Donaldson stories together or watch the Snail And The Whale animation on BBC iPlayer. Can your child explain the events in the story and why they happen? This helps with comprehension when reading.
Sports Day
A big well done to all Reception children who took part in their very first Sports Roundabout Sports Day. They practised so many key sport skills from throwing and catching, jumping, team work, hand-eye coordination to running. Everyone participated so well – and in front of such a large audience too.
We practise all these skills daily in our outdoor area too…
Transition
The transition into KS1 has started 🙂 Wednesday morning was full of excitement and a few little nerves, as the children visited their year one classrooms and spent some time with their new teachers. When they returned to class, the children were excited to share what they had been doing. Those little nerves had flown away and in their place was a super positivity for the big move in September. Well done Reception superstars! We will visit KS1 a few more times before the end of the year.
Ziggy and Buddy
Ziggy and Buddy are taking their last journeys of the year. They have thoroughly enjoyed visiting the children’s homes and getting up to all sorts of fun. Thank you for engaging with this activity this year – the children value sharing their experiences so much!
Nell Bank
Nell Bank
We had a wonderful visit to Nell Bank on Tuesday. We learnt all about recycling, looking after the environment and about badgers. We made badger sets, explored tunnels and cooled off in the water area where we had to work as team to transport the water around.
We’ve been keeping cool this week by listening to stories in the shade of our willow trees and sharing some of Nursery space where it is much cooler. The children had to work together to build and explore the space.
Next week we will be looking at ‘Sharing a Shell’ by Julia Donaldson. We’ll be talking about our own experiences of the seaside.
Help at Home
As we are consolidating all of their phonics knowledge ready for Year 1 please keep practising their reading and celebrating their successes with their reading e-books.
Sun safety
☀️ Sun, sun, sun! ☀️
With the warm weather set to continue next week, we’d like to remind you of the following sun safety measures:
- Please send your child with a named sunhat every day.
- Ensure your child brings a named water bottle.
- Parents and carers should apply sun cream before school.
- Please label your child’s sun cream with their name.
- If you would like your child to apply sun cream at lunchtime, please ask them to put it in the basket in the classroom each morning. Staff will remind them as they come into the classroom.
- To help us, please consider using an all-day sun cream and applying it at home before your child arrives.
Thank you for helping us to keep everyone safe in the sun!
Tidy
This week, children enjoyed reading our new story, Tidy by Emily Gravett.
Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog (it’s along the play bar) and turn off auto play – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.
We’ve enjoyed discovering the woodland world of Pete the Badger and have started to explore some of the themes and important messages in the story in preparation for our trip to Nell Bank next week. As we listened to the story, we paused to discuss the meaning of unfamiliar words. Some of the vocabulary we explored included tidy, environment, habitat and mistake. We also started to retell the story using a story map to help us remember the key events.
Many of the activities at Nell Bank will be linked to this story so look out for next week’s post to find out more!
Phonics
In phonics, we’ve been learning to read and spell words ending in -s and -es. Children explored how the letter s at the end of a word can make different sounds (/s/ and /z/) and we practised reading plural words such as trains, sports and dresses. The children also worked on reading and spelling longer words using the phonics sounds they already know, helping to build their confidence and fluency in reading and writing.
Help at home: Support your child to consolidate their learning of tricky words by playing Tricky Word Treasure Hunt.
- Write a few tricky words on separate pieces of paper.
- Hide them around the room.
- Ask your child to find a word, read it aloud and then use it in a sentence.
You could make the game more challenging by asking your child to find a specific word or by timing how quickly they can read all of the words. This is a fun way to practise recognising tricky words and build reading confidence.
Maths
This week in maths, we’ve been revisiting and consolidating our understanding of numbers to 10 by:
- Exploring how numbers can be split into smaller parts and recombined to make a whole.
- Comparing quantities and using the language of more than, fewer than and equal to.
- Investigating one more and one less within 10.
- Using practical resources such as rekenreks, counters and our fingers to deepen our understanding of number.
- Playing games and solving problems to develop confidence with numbers to 10.
PE
Children were very excited to find out we were going to play our ‘Mouse Trap’ game again! We revisited the game to continue developing our aiming, control and coordination skills and added a new twist. This time, we adapted the game by using rackets and hockey sticks to control and stop the balls. We experimented with different-sized balls to provide a range of challenges and to encourage the children to move in different ways to intercept, stop and direct the ball.
Poetry Basket
This week was a rhyme week in our Poetry Basket sessions. The children enjoyed joining in and singing ‘The Big Ship Sails on the Ally Oh‘ and had lots of fun learning the actions and joining in with the repeated phrases.
The Night Pirates
Our book this week is The Night Pirates by Peter Harris. We have been reading the story and talking about the different vocabulary. Next we will draw a story map and use it to retell the story.
Here is some of the pirate provision that has enhanced our learning this week.
For our writing challenge we wrote about what we’d done in the half term. Here are some examples;
This week, we introduced the children to Rekenreks. We continued to develop our subitising skills by using our “fast eyes” to quickly identify the number of beads shown. Rekenreks help children explore the structure of small numbers and build confidence in recognising quantities without counting.
We learnt that all of the beads should start on the right-hand side. This is known as the ‘ready position’. The children practised using the ‘pause (think), place (one finger), push (the beads)’ method. We always make sure we’re only using one finger when carefully pushing the beads.
No swimming
Unfortunately, Reception won’t be able to go swimming this week (03 June) as we’re still unable to use the pool. Children have been told to avoid any disappointment and they’re all looking forward to their PE lesson with Foot Tech instead!
Cities and seasides
