Reception have had a super morning making reindeer biscuits and hats for our party this afternoon. Merry Christmas everyone! We hope you all have a lovely holiday.

This week we will be sending home another proud cloud. Please send it back into school after the Christmas holidays. Please comment on any Christmas celebration fun or other special events/activities your child got up to. Please remember to write your child’s name on the cloud. Also when we return our topic will be ‘Into the woods.’ Over the holidays can you create your own woodland animal craft that we can display in the classroom. You might want to draw/paint/collage your animal. Below are some ideas…

This week in Reception we shared the story ‘Lost and Found’ by Oliver Jeffers. After reading the story we talked about how we could make other people feel better if they were feeling lonely like the penguin was feeling in the story. This led to lots of discussion about how to be a good friend. During our Independent Learning Time, we were very shocked to find a lost penguin in our outdoor environment. We think he came all the way from the South Pole as he was covered in snow and ice.  We decided it would be a good idea to make some found posters describing what the penguin looked like in the hope that we could reunite him with the little boy from the story.   Once we completed our posters, we then got to work to make a boat out of different junk material to help the boy and penguin travel back safely to the South Pole. We tested our boats in the water tray to find out if they floated safely across the water. Some of us had to adapt our designs and think of a different approach as the boats started to sink in the water.

In our creative area we had lots of fun exploring the ice and water colours. We watched in anticipation as some of the water colours ran into each other on the ice causing some lovely colour mixing to occur! To help the penguin feel at home we designed and made igloo’s out of sugar cubes. We had to colour how many cubes we used by representing it on tens frames.

We were very busy in the home corner preparing for Christmas. We talked about what we do at home to prepare for Christmas. We decorated the home, we made shopping lists and looked in food magazines for the food we wanted to eat over the Christmas period, we made our own Christmas lists and started to send and receive Christmas cards-all very busy busy!

We have been finding out about the polar regions this week. We talked about what we thought the weather would be like and what animals we might find there. Can you remember which pole we usually find penguins and polar bears? We were very interested to find out how the penguins manage to keep themselves warm and don’t get wet where they live. To find out we did an experiment where we had to colour in a penguin using wax crayons. We then used some water with blue food colouring and sprayed some on our picture. We were amazed how the water repelled off the penguin picture. This is because of the wax in the crayons, and this is like how the wax on a penguin’s feathers repels the water and helps keep the penguin warm and dry.

Outside we had to be problem solvers and try and free the frozen penguins from the ice. It was lovely to ignite some ‘Awe and Wonder’ in the children. It led to lots of discussion about how melting and freezing can cause materials to change. We used tools to chip away at the ice, we used hot water and warm blankets to try and melt the ice. The children had so much fun.

We have some great performers in Reception. The children showed great Team Ant skills and worked together to build a stage from our big wooden interlocking blocks. We had singers, dancers, musicians and comedians. We even had a judging panel who awarded some lovely 10’s for points!

The children enjoyed making snow fluff cakes in our mud kitchen outside this week. We used shaving foam, blue food colouring, ice cubes and lot of MUD to make our creations. We also froze our cakes and had fun exploring what happened as the ice and foam started to melt.

We would like to say a BIG well done to the children in Reception who completed the Food from Around the World homework project. It has been lovely to share the children’s culinary delights and we certainly have some talented chefs in the making! We hope you enjoyed completing this task at home.

We are getting in the Christmas spirit and we helped decorate the Christmas tree in the dinner hall. It looks wonderful!