Welcome to Reception
Reception Staff
- Miss Smith – Reception Teacher
- Mrs Richards – HLTA
- Mrs Whensley – School Support Assistant
Autumn Term 2 2018
Room on the Broom
We have been learning about rhyme through the Julia Donaldson story ‘Room on the Broom’. We have had fun dressing up and role-playing parts of the story. We have enjoyed lots of messy and exciting activities, including finding rhyming objects in red witch’s potion and green slime! We have used our fine motor skills to carefully thread spider webs and witch’s hats, and made patterned wands with the beads.
Guy Fawkes Night
We have been learning about Guy Fawkes and have made lots of beautiful firework art!
Also, Early Years was very excited to have a visit from some Firefighters from Bishop Auckland Fire Station. Following a classroom discussion about how to keep ourselves safe on Bonfire Night, the Firefighters showed us their amazing engine and let us try on their helmets! Then the most exciting part! We all had a turn squirting water using the huge hoses- lots of fun was had by all! Including the teachers!
Following the visit, we enjoyed small world role play with our wooden fire station and truck. We role played and built our own class bonfire. We drank yummy hot chocolate with marsh mallows, and dipped melted matchmakers in sprinkles to make edible sparklers- delicious!
Diwali
We have learnt about Diwali, the Hindu festival of light. We shared the story ‘A Row of Lights’, teaching the children of the significance of Diva lamps. We made our own coil Diva lamps from clay, and painted them beautiful colours. We have also enjoyed learning about repeating patterns while creating sparklers made from pipe cleaners and beads. We used paints, chalk, collage and junk model resources to make incredible fireworks too! We have been interested in the different music listened to in India….during PE we had enormous fun making up our own Bollywood dances! We have talked about the different foods eaten in India, and had a go at making some Indian coconut sweets- they were delicious! We designed Mehndi patterns with felt pens on cut out hands and also created symmetrical Rangoli patterns with 2D shapes. During Literacy, we have labelled our Diwali pictures.
Christmas
We had an amazing time celebrating Christmas in Reception! We have learnt about the birth of Jesus, and performed a wonderful version of the Nativity to parents and carers. We dressed up, remembered our lines and sang beautifully! We were truly fantastic!
We have enjoyed lots of Christmas craft activities, including making tree decorations, cards and calendars, moulding chocolates, and making and decorating biscuits.
We wrote letters to Santa and posted them ourselves in the letterbox opposite school. We have loved role playing as Santa and his elves and have listened to lots of Christmas stories!
During the last week before the holidays, we learnt about Christingle. We made our own Christingles in class which we took to St John’s Church for our Christmas service. Reception were very sensible when having their candles lit, and stood so still to sing Silent Night. A beautiful moment!
We had a fabulous time at our Early Years Christmas party! We played games, danced, ate party food and had such a fun time! The afternoon as finished off with a visit from a very special man, dressed in a red suit…….can you guess who it was?
In addition to all the excitement this half term, we have also completed our phase two phonics sounds and have been learning to blend to read. Many of the children now have reading books with words- fantastic!
We have continued to practice letter formation, particularly in our names; some of us have begun to label our picture with cvc words or beginning and end sounds.
We can’t wait to tell you about more exciting times and the progress we will have made next term- Thank you for your continued support.
Autumn Term 2017
Our first week
We have had so much fun settling in to our new classroom, learning new routines (especially lunchtimes) and making new friends!
Over the Summer holiday we were given ‘Whatever Next’ to read with our grown-ups. We have enjoyed talking about the story together and making some of our own rocket creations and lolly stick puppets.
We have been investigating the new areas in Reception and have particularly enjoyed learning in our outdoor area.
‘I am special’
As part of our R.E topic we have been learning about ourselves, and what makes us special. During circle-time we have chatted about who is special to us, what we are good at and how we are all unique- ‘it’s ok to be different’.
We have loved painting self- portraits and practising writing our names.
Physical
We have been learning to get ourselves undressed and dressed independently for P.E. We’ve had fun practising our balancing and jumping skills using the apparatus.
We have begun a gross motor skills programme, taking part in activities which promote muscle strength, endurance, and stability. We have particularly enjoyed ‘Dough Disco’ and dancing the ‘Breaky Bop’ in the hall.
To help us at lunch-time we have also been practicing cutting techniques in the classroom.
Autumn/Harvest Stay and Play
We went on a lovely walk around the school grounds looking for signs of Autumn. We noticed lots of exciting things such as crispy, coloured leaves, fallen apples and spikey pine cones! When we came back, we made some beautiful Autumn collages and used our phonics knowledge to label our work with initial sounds.
We had an amazing time at our Harvest ‘Stay and Play’! Many thanks to parents and carers who came to support this event. We bravely performed ‘The Little Red Hen’ and sang Harvest songs to our grown-ups, the finale being a very enthusiastic ‘Our God is a Great Big God’! Before going to play in the areas, we enjoyed a tasty oaty biscuit that we’d made the previous day. Grown-ups and children alike had lots of fun vegetable printing, making Little Red Hen masks and creating woodland animals with the play-dough.
Well done to Reception class for being the top attenders in September
Sports Day 2017
Reception had lots of fun this morning taking part in our sports day races.
Mini Beasts and School Trip June 2017
Our theme for June has been Mini-beasts
During literacy we have been finding out about mini-beasts; we have labelled our pictures and paintings, and some of us made our own fact books!
We have been continuing to gain confidence using a number line to add and subtract during Maths. When we had worked out the answers, we used colour keys to colour mini-beast pictures as part of the activity. We have also been using butterfly patterns to learn about symmetry and ladybird spots to continue learning about doubling.
We have enjoyed lots of craft activities, concentrating on skills which promote our fine motor skills. We have thread beads on pipe cleaners, then twisted and joined them, shaping them into butterflies. We have concertinaed strips of black paper to use for spider legs which we stuck on painted, black stones. We carefully linked together paper chain caterpillars. We have used modelling dough, clay and play dough to make and paint mini-beasts creations.
We went on an amazing mini-beast hunt around our school grounds. We learnt about the preferred habitats of different mini-beasts, and used tick sheets to record our findings. We followed this by making some delicious raspberry jelly which we dropped (jelly) worms into before leaving it to set! Mmm!
Our School Trip
Reception enjoyed a day out at Hamsterly Forest. We participated in a workshop during the morning, which was very exciting! As we ventured through the forest in the rain, we took part in a trail, answering questions from ‘The Gruffalo’ story by Julia Donaldson. We explored the woodland, looking particularly at the habitats of some of the creatures from ‘The Gruffalo’. We split into groups and used the natural resources to make homes for the Gruffalo, snake, mouse, owl and fox…we even made them a meal! We found that the Gruffalo had clearly been brushing his hair while he’d been ‘out and about’, as he had left strands of it all over the hedgerow! We decided we would use it to make friendship bracelets for each other. Then, we crossed Pooh Stick Bridge where we challenged each other to a game of Pooh Sticks! After we had eaten our picnic lunch, we used an app on the iPads to follow an awesome Gruffalo Trail, where we met all the creatures from the story. We had an amazing day!
Jack and the Beanstalk
During April and May, Reception have been learning and having lots of fun with our theme ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. For literacy, we have read different versions of the story and have been retelling through pictures and paintings and in our writing. We have been labelling our independent work with captions and sentences, and some of us have written and illustrated our own books! We decorated pots, planted broad beans and observed their growth. We were ‘Mean to a Bean’, as we experimented to find out what plants need in order to grow. We have also been planting cress and sunflower seeds. We have been experimenting with colour mixing, while creating a beanstalk and jelly beanstalk for our class display. We enjoyed exciting and ‘tasty’ maths lessons, using jelly beans as we learnt to double, share and half.
