Autumn Term

Term 1b Week 4

Christmas has begun in Newburn Reception Class.  We have been making our Penguin decorations to sell at the Christmas fair, getting painty making hand print Christmas trees to decorate our class door and going into the hall with Year 1 to begin practising our Nativity play, learning songs, lines and when to stand up and sit down.  We are continuing to think about the world around us and how we find out about it using our sense of touch, working hard to describe the feelings using words that describe texture like soft, fluffy, hard, squishy, rough, smooth as well as guessing what the objects were. The school was decorated on Thursday evening so that we are ready to begin the count down to Christmas and we were able to go out and explore and investigate in the snow on Friday afternoon!

Term 1b Week 3

Reception have moved on to thinking about our sense of smell, things that smell lovely like flowers or a pizza cooking to things that smell nasty like a farm yard full of cows to food that has gone off.  We shared the smell containers and thought about how to describe the smell, sweet, sharp, flowery, strong, spicy as well as guessing what the smell could be, we made sure we shut the lids so that we could trap the smells inside for later.  We have been writing sentences about what we can smell using our phonic knowledge to think about the sounds we could hear and how to write them down. 

Term 1b Week 2

Continuing our theme of exploring our senses we have been thinking about our sense of hearing and all of the things we can hear.  We matched sounds from a bag of instruments and environmental sounds like a bag rustling or a pen clicking, the children had to listen carefully and pick up the correct object and try to make it make the same noise. 

We also had a sound lotto game where we used our coomba to listen carefully through the head phones and put a counter on the space when we heard our sound.  In Maths we have been ordering things according to their size and using comparison words - smaller, smallest, bigger, biggest.  

Term 1b Week 1

Our topic for the first half of this half term is 'How Do I find Out About The World?'. We are exploring our senses and thinking about how they help us.  This week we focused on our sense of sight, learning about fireworks night and making firework pictures with chalk on black paper then thinking about Diwali the Hindu, Sikh and Jain faiths festival of light, celebrating the triumph of light over darkness.  Reception made salt dough Diva lamps and decorated them with paint and glitter. Reception have also made poppies and talked about the 11th of November, practised their counting from 10 to 20, learnt 4 new sounds (v,w,y,x) and written simple sentences about things they could see. The dark tent was up in our small world area too so that we could investigate the light equipment. 

Term 1a Week 8

The Crazy Creatures company came to our class this week to share with us some of their pets, there were chinchillas, tortoises, corn snakes, a guinea pig and a skinny pig (a hairless guinea pig), bearded dragons, a tarantula and a massive snake that was as long as our carpet-space mat!  The children (and adults) were really brave!  It was a lovely celebration of all of the hard work we have done around our text this half term Dear Zoo. 

Term 1a Week 7

Our Maths focus for this week has been 2D shapes we have especially been thinking about circles, triangles, squares and rectangles as well as using mathematical language to describe shapes; side, straight, corner, curved, same, different, equal, angle, short, long.  We enjoyed singing along to some shape songs on YouTube, I have added links below so that you can watch them at home too.  The children applied their new knowledge by finding shapes in the classroom and bringing them back to the carpet to share which ones they had found. 

Term 1a Week 6

By Friday the children will have been taught 20 grapheme phoneme correspondences (GCPs) (letters and sounds) and 4 sight words, words you can't sound out (is, as, the, I)!  We had our first Library session this week, usually we will return and borrow books to share with adults on a Monday. The children enjoyed looking at the books they had chosen. 

We have been thinking about collections of objects, 2s and 3s and subitising not counting, in Reception we talk about knowing without counting as with dice and domino patterns we have been thinking about holding dot patterns in our heads and trying to recreate them with our fingers. 

The author Emily Dodds read parts of her new book 'Tell me about... Plants' on an online author visit, she taught us some songs and dances as well as introducing us to her friend Hazel the squirrel puppet. 

Term 1a Week 5

We have been practising using our phonics to listen to letter sounds and blend them into words.  With a group of objects in front of them the children listened to an adult sound talk a word eg d-o-g and had to pick up the correct object. 

Ordering Numicon to 10 has also been a focus this week, thinking about looking for a piece that is one bigger or counting to check which comes next.  

Collecting natural objects from around our school grounds and using them to make Andy Goldsworthy Style temporary art was lots of fun.  The children enjoyed looking at some images of Andy Goldsworthy sculptures and were really keen to share their ideas and talk about the themes and objects they could see. 

Term 1a Week 4

We have had another busy week culminating in an autumn walk around our school grounds, we talked about the changes of season and the different weather and temperatures as well as the colour changes. Then we spent a while getting ready for the wet cold weather and went on our adventure. 

Term 1a Week 3

Reception are learning to tell the story of 'Dear Zoo' by Rod Campbell.  The repeating phrases and colourful animals make it a lovely story to commit to memory, we have added actions to help us remember.  If you haven't heard the story before there is a link to YouTube below so you can watch and join in with it for yourself.

Term 1a Week 2

This week we have worked hard to make carrot cup cakes, we weighed out the ingredients, grated the carrots, mixed everything together in a blender, and then put it in the cake cases.  The next day we sequenced the pictures and wrote or did drawings, talking about instructions to make the cakes. 

Term 1a Week 1

It has been a busy start to our Reception year with half of the class attending in the morning and half in the afternoon. We have had a go at name writing and numeral writing as well as trying some letter recognition which the children have all joined in with happily.  The weather has been lovely which has meant we have been able to fully explore and investigate our outside area as well as our indoor space.