Supertato
Supertato
This last week’s book focus was the amazing Supertato by Sue Hendra. There was a real buzz about the classroom with the children enjoying all the linked activities. They designed traps to capture Evil Pea, wrote wanted posters for the villain, created patterns with vegetables, created observational drawings of different vegetables and used green pea counters to make words in the Phonics area.
Our new word of the week is: mischievous. A perfect word to describe the small, green villain in our story!
Help at home: you could read some other Supertato stories (there are many) or watch some episodes of Supertato on BBC iPlayer. Talk to your child after the story/episode to see if they’ve understood the story and the events Why did that happen? What do you think might happen next? Who was the main character? Why did they feel that way? Did you like it? All these types of questions help with reading comprehension.
Poem of The Week
This week’s Poem is A Little House. We enjoyed the rhythm and rhyme in this poem and talked about the new words we came across like curling and drifting.
Gross motor skills
Did you know that gross motor skills helps with early writing skills?
Gross motor skills involving large muscle movements like crawling, climbing, and throwing are crucial to early writing. This is because they build strength in core, shoulder and arm muscles. These movements enable children to sit upright, stabilize their shoulders for controlled pencil grip, and improve coordination. It also helps to improve stamina when writing. We practise lots of gross motor skills every day in our outdoor area.
Help at home: take your child to the park, ride bikes and scoot together. Play tennis, football, rugby or dance around your kitchen. All these playful activities help in your child’s writing journey.
Art
Following on from our visit to the ‘gallery’ last week, we begun to create some wintery art. The art work is inspired by Claude Monet’s magpie Painting. We created a wash with watered down blue paint and mopped some of the paint using different media to create different effects. Next week we’ll finish off our creations using tissue paper. Look out for photos of our finished art.
Dates for your diary:
Wednesday 4th Feb – Stay and Learn
Tuesday 10th Feb – Parents teacher meetings (booked appointments)
Thursday 12th – Parent teacher meetings (booked appointments)
Friday 13th – break up for half term
Packed lunches
Does your child have a packed lunch at school? If so, please download our Guide to Healthy Packed Lunches.
Did you know that popcorn and whole grapes are a choking hazard for children under 5? Lot’s of people don’t! The Food Standards Agency. has published the following advice on how to prepare food safely for your young child.
Penguin Huddle and Claude Monet
In our literacy lessons this week, we enjoyed reading Penguin Huddle by Ross Montgomery. In the story, the penguins huddled together during an icy storm but it was so cold that they got stuck together and couldn’t break free!
Our word of the week is: huddle. Ask your child to tell you what it means. Can they use it in a sentence?
Here is some of our super writing from this week.
We also watched a short clip from an episode of BBC Frozen planet to find out more about where penguins live. We located the UK and the Antarctic on a map and found their locations on a globe.
How is the Antarctic environment different to the United Kingdom? After watching the clip, we looked at some photographs of the Antarctic and compared them to the United Kingdom to find similarities and differences.
Focus Artist: Monet
This week, children loved exploring the art of Claude Monet. We found out about his life and his amazing pictures of the natural world! On Thursday afternoon, we visited a special ‘pop-up’ Art Gallery in the Hub.
When looking at the artwork, we used sentence stems to talk about our opinions.
I like it because…
I don’t like it because…
Children’s examples of speech.
“I like it because it’s looks the same as outside, look outside the window, it’s the same.”
“I like the colours, the pink and the blue.”
“I don’t like it because it’s a bit grey and it looks cold”
After looking at the gallery, we took inspiration from some of the pictures to create our own Monet inspired artwork. We’ve also been exploring colour mixing to find out what happens when you mix two of the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) together.
Maths -composition
This week, children consolidated their understanding of the composition of 5 using the familiar rhyme ‘5 Little Ducks’ By singing the rhyme and moving the ducks during each verse, children investigated part–part–whole relations, e.g. seeing that 5 can be made of 3 and 2.
There are five ducks in the pond but when one duck swims away, we can see that there are four ducks in the pond and one on the hill. 5 can be made of 4 and 1. When another duck swims away, there are 3 ducks and 2 on the hill. 5 can be made of 3 and 2.
We also used our fingers to show this, first holding up 5 fingers and then putting one down each time.
Poetry Picnic
Our poetry sessions this week have been a little different as we learnt and recited a traditional nursery rhyme.
The children used gestures and expression to recite ‘Jack and Jill’.
Phonics
Spring 1 week 3 has focused on the digraphs ur, ow, oi and the trigraph ear.
We’ve learnt the tricky words; my, by, all. Tricky words are words that should be read by sight.
Help at home:
Each week, we’d like to give you an idea of a game you could play at home to make reading even more exciting.
This week’s game is: Tricky Word Splat
- Write a selection of tricky words on paper/sticky notes.
- Place around the room/floor.
- Say a tricky word for your child to splat. You might jump on the words, splat with a masher or create your own ideas.
Lost and Found
This week, we’ve continued to enjoy the story Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers and have been making lots of connections between the book and our topic learning.
We explored a world map and located England and Antarctica, before tracing the journey the boy and the penguin would take from where we live in the UK all the way to the South Pole. We revisited what we already know about maps, with some children remembering that blue shows oceans and green shows land. Others also spotted the orange and brown areas and suggested these might be deserts.
We also compared our weather with the weather in Antarctica and talked about how different it is. Our word of the week is climate and we’ve been using it to describe what the weather is usually like in different places.
Penguin observations
Children loved being zoologists this week. They enjoyed observing a live stream of the penguins at Edinburgh Zoo and wrote about how the penguins move and interact with one another.
In writing, we created ‘Missing’ posters, carefully describing the penguin from the story and thinking about the key details someone would need to help find him.
Maths; the staircase pattern
In Maths, we’ve been looking at counting and ordinality- specifically, the ‘one more’ relationship that creates ‘the staircase pattern’.
We were introduced to the concept by watching an episode of the Numberblocks, before moving on to create our own staircase patterns.
We even overheard some of the children singing the Numberblocks song, “I’m bigger than you. I’m smaller than you. Diddly diddly doo!” as they ordered their towers into the staircase pattern.
Phonics
This week, our phonics learning focused on the digraphs oo, ar and or.
We also learned the tricky words was, you and they. Tricky words are read by sight, as they cannot be sounded out easily.
Help at home – Tricky Words
Here’s a simple game for you to play at home to support reading.
Tricky Word Bingo.
- Enter your chosen tricky words into an online picker (such as pickerwheel.com) or write them on paper to choose from at random.
- Ask your child to select 4–6 tricky words and write them down. You can join in too, or invite a sibling to play.
- Take turns choosing words.
- The first person to cross off all their words and shout BINGO wins!
Poetry Basket
Each week, we learn a new poem and recite it daily. Saying the poem aloud helps the children focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word and line, supporting their reading development. This week’s poem is Who Has Seen the Wind?
Swimming
Rainbow class made a splash in their first swimming session this week, with lots of happy faces and plenty of laughter as they splashed in the pool! They followed instructions carefully to enter and exit the pool safely and took part in games using pool noodles and floating toys to help build their confidence in the water.
We’re sure that Sunshine class are looking forward to their first lesson next week. They’ll need their kit on Wednesday.
Help at home – Self-help skills
To help make swimming days run smoothly, please make sure all clothing is clearly labelled. You can also support your child further at home by encouraging them to practise getting dressed independently. It’d be especially helpful for children to practise turning their clothes the right way around (such as trouser legs and sleeves) to help them be as independent as they can be when getting dressed after their lesson.
Penguins, paints and pipettes!
And finally, here are a few more photos from our learning this week. We’ve been improving our fine motor skills by balancing penguins and squeezing pipettes, practising our throwing skills, experimenting with paints on different media and designing our own certificates.
Reading: It’s so important!
We hope that you’re enjoying reading your child’s library book with them. We call this a ‘love of reading’ book – to do just that, encourage a love of reading for your child! Reading to and with your child can have a huge positive impact on your child’s education.
This research is a powerful message of the impact you can have when reading to/with your child:
At school, your child reads a physical book four times a week – with a focus on teaching phonics skills. This is then sent home as an eBook. The purpose of the eBook at home is to celebrate your child’s success (in phonics skills). Your child should be able to read most of this book confidently and really feel like a reader.
We’ve chosen to use eBooks at home for many benefits. Allocating eBooks frees up about two hours of teacher or TA time changing books – now spent teaching reading!
Here’s some information on how to access eBooks but if you’re having any problems please speak to your child’s class teacher.
Happy reading!
Happy New Year!
Happy new Year!
Happy New Year to all our Reception Class families. Welcome back.
What a first term we had! Everyone made such a great start to school life during the first term – we’re so proud of your children. We’re looking forward to all the fun learning we have planned for you this term.
A look back over some of the festive activities we shared together:
- Learning about how Christmas is celebrated around the world. We especially liked learning how Santa needs to change into shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops when delivering presents in Australia. He asks the kangaroos to help him deliver presents to give the reindeer a little rest. We also loved searching the class for the hidden almond just like some people search for the hidden almond in the rice pudding in Denmark. It’s thought to bring good luck to those who find it.
- We got a phone call in class to let us know that our teachers had received a very special email. It was very mysterious. The email was a video of Santa himself exploring the Nursery, Reception and KS1 classes. He had hidden a bag of presents in our classes for us to find and we each got to take home a little gift.
- Performing songs and poems for parents and carers in the Christmas show.
Swimming
School Trip
A gentle reminder to please pay for the upcoming trip on Arbor. We’re visiting This Green Moon and the cost of this visit is £21.44 per child to cover entry and the ever-increasing travel costs. During this visit, children will explore the outdoors, get mucky, build dens, sit around a fire, learn crafts and skills and all the while, appreciate the surroundings and develop a love of nature.
Fire and ice
The Nativity
Some of our learning is top secret this week, as we continue preparations for the festive season! There’s been Christmas crafts and of course, lots of practise for our very special show.
Here’s a little insight into the super learning we can share from this week…
Advent and The Nativity Story
We’ve been learning about the story of the first Christmas- The Nativity. Nativity is our word of the week.
We started the week by finding out why Christians choose to celebrate Christmas and where the word ‘advent’ comes from.
Did you know both Rainbow and Sunshine Class has their own Advent tree? ‘Star of the Day’ gets to choose a decoration each morning. See if you can spot it next time you are in the classroom!
We learnt a version of The Nativity with actions and enjoyed re-telling the story using a Nativity scene in the classroom.
In our writing, we used an image of The Nativity to either write a sentence or label characters and/or animals from the image.
We discussed that people have different traditions and reasons for celebrating Christmas. Next week, we’ll be looking at how Christmas is celebrated across the world.
Maths; 2d Shapes
In maths this week, we’ve been re-visiting 2d shapes. We’ve been naming shapes and discussing their properties. We’ve been exploring which shapes can fit within other shapes. We’ll continue our shape explorations into next week.
Expressive Arts and Design; Observational drawing
The children developed their observational drawing skills by carefully looking at a Poinsettia before drawing it with wax crayons. As they examined the plant, they noticed details like the veins running through the leaves. Using these observations, they chose colours purposefully.
Phonics
It’s review and assessment week! This week the children have been re-visiting all they have learnt across the autumn 2 term and completed a phonics check.
It’s been fantastic to see the progress made since September and how all of the children’s confidence has grown in regards to both their reading and their writing skills.
Help at home; Please keep re-visiting the learn at home sheets. If your child has been at school, you will have received an updated ‘GPC mat’ with the sounds and tricky words we have covered so far. If any GPCs or tricky words have been highlighted, these are the ones your child was unsure of during the phonics check and therefore need a little more re-visiting. If your child has a blank sheet in their bag, they knew all GPCs/tricky words covered in the assessment.
Poetry Picnic
Each week we will be learning a new poem. We will recite this poem each day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is called Who has seen the wind? By Christina Rosetti.
We’ve also been learning a range of winter/Christmas themed poems, ready for our EYFS production- we’ll keep those ones a surprise!
We talk about how a poem sometimes has rhyming words and sometimes doesn’t. We also talk about how a poem can have a fast rhythm or a slow rhythm.
Swimming
Posters detailing the dates for swimming sessions (after half term), will be put on classroom doors this week. They will also be posted with further details next week, on the Class News post.
Reminders and Diary Dates
- Tuesday 16 December 1.30pm / Wednesday 17 December 9.45am Early Years Christmas Performance
- Thursday 18 December Christmas Dinner
- Friday 19 December Non-uniform day and Reception Christmas Party day.
Owl Babies
This week in Reception, we enjoyed reading Owl Babies by Martin Waddell. This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.
Using a story map, we created our own actions to help us retell the story from the beginning to the end. We practised remembering key events from the story and included the repeated phrases.
I want my Mummy!
All owls think a lot.
What’s all the fuss?
Phonics
In phonics this week, we’ve focused on:
- words with s /s/ added at the end (hats, sits)
- words with s /z/ added at the end (bags)
- words ending s /z/ (his)
We’ve learnt the tricky words: we, me, be
Tricky words are words that children learn to recognise by sight. Children have been introduced to many new Phase 2 tricky words this half term. Regular practice, both at home and at school, will help them to remember and recognise these words.
Help at home: Here are a few games you can play to help your child learn their tricky words:
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Tricky word doorbell/password: Stick a tricky word on a doorframe. Children say the word correctly each time they go through the door.
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Tricky word hunt / hide-and-seek: Write tricky words on pieces of paper and hide them around the house. Children find them and read each word aloud.
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Pairs: Write each tricky word twice on separate pieces of paper. Mix them up and play a simple pairs game where children have to read the word and find the matching card.
In provision, we’ve been reading and highlighting our focus tricky words.
Poetry Basket
Each week we learn a new poem and say it together every day. Reciting the poem out loud helps children to hear the sounds and rhythm in the words, which supports their early reading skills. This week’s poem is called ‘Wise Old Owl‘. Please follow the link to enjoy watching the children recite it.
Maths: counting, ordinality and cardinality
This week in Maths, we’ve been busy:
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practising one-to-one correspondence by carefully matching objects to their representations
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developing our understanding of cardinality — knowing that the last number counted tells us the total
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counting abstract things such as claps and jumps
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counting beyond 20 to spot number patterns
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linking quantities to numbers within 5
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exploring how an amount stays the same even when it is moved or rearranged
Learning journey drop-ins
Thank you to all the parents and carers who were able to join us for the first look at your child’s learning journey book. We’ll be inviting you back to view these again on specific dates in the spring and summer terms, but they are also available at any time in the classroom if you would like to take a peek.
A few parents and carers asked about the written observations and the numbers that were written next to them. Our Early Years Curriculum Guide describes our curriculum and explains the age-related expectations for children in Reception. Please ask if you have any questions.
Diary Dates
- Friday 12 December 3.15-4.15 FOSP Christmas Disco (bring named party clothes in a bag to change into at the end of the school day)
- Tuesday 16 December 1.30pm / Wednesday 17 December 9.45am Early Years Christmas Performance
- Thursday 18 December Christmas Dinner
- Friday 19 December Non-uniform day and Reception Christmas Party day. More details to follow.
How To Catch A Star
Literacy
This week our focus story was ‘How to Catch a Star‘ by Oliver Jeffers. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip). We read the book and spent time retelling the story in our own words.
Phonics
During our recent Phonics lessons we’ve been expanding our digraph knowledge. Digraphs are two letters that make one sound. Here are the ones we now know so far:
ck, ss, ll, ff, zz, qu, ch, sh, th, ng, nk
Help at home: you could write these digraphs on paper to play with your child. They’d be great as flashcards to practise or if you made two sets, you could play games such as Snap or Matching Pairs. You also hide one pack around the house and then use the other as a prompt to find the right one.
The Phonics challenge in class this week was to challenge a friend to a Tricky Word Boo game. You need to read as many words as you can and collect them in a bowl as you go. Be careful though! If you come across the word ‘Boo’ – you need to put all your words back. The winner is the person with the most cards at the end.
Help at home: You could play a game of Tricky Word Boo at home.
Word Of The Week
Our word of the week this week is ‘reflection‘.
We use this song to help us practise the word of the week in class:
Poetry Picnic
Each week we learn a new poem and we recite this poem every day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to children about how this can help us become better readers. This week’s poem is called ‘Mice’ by Rose Fyleman.
Here’s Sunshine Class reciting it 🙂
Maths
After watching an episode of Numberblocks, we enjoyed making our own Stampoline prints to show different ways of making 5.
Help at home: You could watch the Stampolines episode with your child
PE
During our PE lessons, we’ve been using the large equipment in the hall to practise our balancing skills. Balancing is one of the fundamental movement skills. It is a key skill for many sports such as tennis, gymnastics, football, ballet, dance, golf and many more.
Winter weather
The winter weather is well and truly here. We had fun in our outdoor classroom mark making in the frost with paint brushes and water and being ice detectives.
