Reception

What an exciting week we have had in Reception! Early Monday morning, we discovered a bottle floating in our water area with a message inside! Both the Active Ants and Busy Bees discovered it was from Captain Swashbuckle sending us on a mission to find some treasure. Children enjoyed following the map, making sure they were looking at the compass to travel North, South, East and West. Once at the destination, children found a treasure chest with a note inside. It was from Pirate Bill who had stolen the treasure! The Active Ants and the Busy Bees then wrote letters back to Pirate Bill explaining that taking somebody else's treasure is not kind and that he should give it back immediately. Towards the end of the week, once Pirate Bill had read the messages the children had written him, he sent them on another treasure hunt to find the stolen treasure! Children have loved the Pirate theme and have enjoyed basing their play around it, making telescopes, eye patches and tea-stained scrolls in the creative area. 

In Maths, children have been exploring capacity where they have learnt key words to describe how much liquid is in a container. Children have been comparing capacities and predicting how many filled water cups would it take to fill another container. 

It's been a great week and we are looking forward to continuing our pirate theme next week! 

This week in Reception we have continued our theme of ‘being healthy’ and have started to learn about all of the people around us who help to keep us healthy. We had a Zoom call with Ailsa the Nurse, who talked to the children all about her job and how she cares for people in the hospital. She even told the children about how they could train to become nurses when they are older if they’re interested! We also met Toby the Doctor over Zoom who shared interesting facts about his job. Our roleplay area in the classroom has been transformed into a doctors surgery and the children have enjoyed acting out their experiences of visiting doctors in there. We’ve also learnt about what happens when you visit the dentist, and there has been a lot of fascination with milk teeth falling out! We’ve talked to the children about how it’s normal for milk teeth to fall out from around 5 years old onwards, and that it doesn’t hurt at all! They’ve been so excited to share their experiences of the Tooth Fairy visiting the children who’ve already lost a tooth!

We’ve also taught the final sounds from Phase 3 phonics! The children will now spend the rest of their time in Reception recapping the Phase 3 sounds and applying them in their reading and writing, and we will also be exposing them to more of Phase 4. Phase 4 is a phase where we don’t learn any new sounds however we expose the children to ‘consonant blends’, which is where two or more consonant sounds are put together in a word, for example ‘f-r-o-g’ or ‘b-e-n-ch’.

It’s been another super week for Reception! We have continued our topic on healthy eating and evolved it into learning about all the different things our body needs to stay healthy which are; eating fruits and vegetables, drinking water and milk, exercising, washing our bodies and teeth, getting lots of sleep and taking care of our mental health.

We had a visit to the school kitchen to meet Nicky the head chef who showed us how she keeps the children in school healthy with the food she cooks. We loved seeing all the giant cooking equipment and the enormous bags of pasta and peas! We’ve really enjoyed doing our Mr Motivator challenge this week and have been talking a lot about the effect exercise has on our bodies. We have also been teaching the children about mindfulness, and how important it is to look after their brains.

Try encouraging your child at home to eat their 5 portions of fruits and vegetables each day! Why not make it a family challenge to see who can eat the most across the week?