Reception

A very warm welcome to the Reception class at St Matthew’s Bloxam. C.E.Primary school.

Adults working in our class are: Mrs Parrott, the class teacher and our super LSA’s Mrs Oakes, Mrs Hammond, Mrs Hutchison, Mrs O’Toole and Mrs Santos.

Our curriculum is delivered through the Early Years Foundation Stage prime and specific

areas of Learning and Development which are all interconnected:
 

The Prime areas :

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development

• Communication and Language

• Physical Development

The  Specific areas :

• Literacy

• Mathematics

• Understanding the World

• Expressive Arts and Design
 

We strive to work to the children’s interests, fostering a love of learning and increased independence.

Phonics, maths and English are taught through  daily  interactive key sessions.  To support this learning our Home/School communication books play an important role in involving parents and carers. Weekly information letters are sent out in the book which includes a short open ended task  children may choose to do at home with adult support.

Themes we have explored  so far are: Ourselves and senses, The Fairy Forest, Food and Celebrations.

Here is our medium term plan for the first half of the Spring Term. It has been led by the children's interests.

Building Learning Power

Building Learning Power (BLP) is an approach to helping children to become better learners, both in school and out. It teaches children habits and attitudes that help them face difficulty and uncertainty, calmly, confidently and creatively.

Children who are more confident of their own learning ability learn faster and learn better. They concentrate more, think harder and find learning more enjoyable.

In class we use our Building Learning Power toys, stickers and stars in the Learning Journeys.

In our phonics lessons we are learning our phase 2 phonemes. You should have recived a copy of our Phase 2 animal phoneme booklet, please ask us if you require another one.

As a school we use  PENPALS letter patter. You should have received a copy of our letter formation sheets, please ask us if you require another one.

1st June 2015

We have completed our topic on dinosaurs this week by making erupting volcanoes in a bottle, using vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. We had great fun and we experimented with different amounts of vinegar to see how much the volcano would erupt.

We have started our topic on dinosaurs and the children have had great fun making dinosaur eggs from balloons covered in papier mache. We painted them when they were dry and put them into a dinosaur nest we made from stones and bark chippings. We then cracked the eggs open to find the baby dinosaurs inside!

We have been busy making musical instruments that the giant from Jack and the bean stalk might like to go with his harp. We have used resources such as elastic bands, rice, boxes and tubes.

We went for a walk around the local area and looked at the different types of housing we could see. We thought about their features and how they were suited for a particular purpose. We then painted pictures of houses using different materials to create patterns and textures.

This week we have started our work on the traditional story of ‘The three little pigs’. The children worked with their friends to produce a large story map after hearing the tale, thinking of the sequence of events and the main characters in the story.

We have been exploring materials by building houses for the little pigs from straw, sticks and small model bricks. We predicted which house we thought would be the strongest then tested them by blowing on them. We recorded our results with drawings and simple explanations.

This week we had a visitor from the Dogs Trust. Scott came to talk to us and brought along his pet dog (not a real one). We learnt lots of interesting things about caring for dogs and how we should behave around dogs. We learnt that in our world we should care for living things and be responsible when owning a pet because they rely upon us for care and love.

We found out that dogs need special food like dog biscuits and should not eat our food because it can make them poorly. Just like we brush our hair, dogs need to have their hair brushed with a special brush to stop it from getting knotted and to keep their skin healthy.  Scott showed us a clicker to use when you train your dog, We practised crossing our hands when we heard it. He told us that if a dog runs up to us we should stand still and fold our arms so that the dog doesn’t think we want to play and chase us.

Lots of us have got dogs and we told our friends how we care for them to make them feel happy!

This week has been very exciting in our Reception class. We have got a new plant which we have called Anna. We are looking after her very carefully by watering her and giving her compost made from our left over snack fruit. Every week we will measure her to see how much she has grown.

We have been using the Bee-bots and programming them to move around our pirate objects.

We had a Pirate Tea Party with our families at our Stay and Play session. We made biscuits and decorated them.

We have been very busy this week in Reception! We made pirate ships from cardboard seed pots and added a mast and sails. We predicted what would happen when we sailed them. We launched them and waited. Sadly some of them sank. We redesigned our boats thinking about how we could improve them and launched them again. Success!

Nursery and reception have had a great time starting to build our milk carton igloo. Everyone has been collecting cartons for us. We have built the base and have started on the walls. What a lot of cartons!

Here are a selection of photos showing Reception  children learning in action. We hope you enjoy them!

This week we had a lovely surprise. We saw a puppet show all about a magic watering can.
Here are some photos of it.

We made Christmas trees from paper plates for our Christmas Fayre.