Reception had a brilliant start to the week when they were visited by Shropshire Falconry. It was so exciting watching the owls fly and swoop over our heads. We found out that their feathers helps them fly silently. Chris, Alfie and Mojo were very well behaved when we put the glove on to hold them.

After half term we will be starting our new theme ‘Let’s Get Growing.’ If you go for walks with your child please can you talk to them about any signs of Spring that you might spot or plants beginning to grow.  We will start the theme by thinking about what a plant is so if you have any old or dying plants in pots please do send them in so that the children can dissect them and investigate the plants for themselves.  Please also save any cut flowers (if you are able to dry them out) they are lovely for the children to use in transient art creations or as potions.  If you or other family members are going to be growing things, please do share photos with us as we would love the children to share their experiences.  Any spare seeds or compost are also very welcome as we hope to be doing lots of growing. Over the half term can you create your own piece of flower artwork that we can display in the classroom? We loved all the  woodland animal creations that you sent into school.

Many thanks for your continued support

The Early Years Team

What great detectives we have in Reception. We found a letter from Little Red Riding Hood explaining how someone had eaten the cakes she had made for her Grandma. They had to look at all the clues and try and solve the crime. We had some interesting suspects…

To cheer Little Red and Grandma up we decided to do some baking this week. We looked at the key features of a recipe including the title, ingredients, equipment needed and instructions. We talked about how each instruction included a number to make sure we followed them in the correct order and also how they started with a bossy verb.

We took part in Safer Internet Day this week by sharing the story DigiDuck. We talked about what technology we have at home and how it can help us to have fun and learn new things but most importantly how we can stay safe.

Beware there is a strange looking creature lurking around the Reception area this week…The Gruffalo! The children have had great fun retelling the story with lots of expression and different voices for the animal characters. I wonder if they could retell the story to you at home? Outside we have created our own woodland using the big blocks and lots of natural resources such as tree branches and leaves. We also have been very busy in our Gruffalo mud kitchen cooking up wart pies and prickle soup!!

We have been very creative this week drawing, collaging and painting pictures of the Gruffalo. We tried hard to remember some of the Gruffalo’s key features from the story and use them in our pictures. Some of us used our skills from last week and remembered that we could mix colours together to make new colours, so we had lots of different shades of purple for the prickles.

We had great fun using the Ozobots when we drew our own map of a woodland. We tried to remember what we had learnt from our walk around the school area and how we can represent key features on a map dy drawing images. We remembered the different animals that live in woodlands and some of us drew different types of trees and ponds. We then used pens to help draw a track for the Mouse (Ozobot) to follow to find his nut. We had to think about the thickness of the line so it was easy for the Ozobot to follow and we also found out that if we changed colour pens the Ozobot changed colour too!

What an exciting week Reception children have had so far. We have enjoyed visits from Grace who came and delivered some wonderful activities linked to Chinese New Year and then a busy afternoon with Mr G from AmazingICT where we created our own video clips from the Snow White story and programmed a robot!

The children have really enjoyed listening to the story Snow White and the seven dwarfs and are very good at remembering all of their names! We enjoyed finding 7 jewels that had been hidden in the sand pit by the Evil Queen. Once we had found them we looked at all the different ways the seven dwarfs could make and represent 7 using the jewels.

We have been working on different skills in our malleable area with the playdough. We made dragons and tried hard to make different shapes for the dragon’s body by rolling the playdough. We then used different loose parts to add features to our dragons.

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Base 2 have had a great afternoon with Mr G from AmazingICT. We found out how to use a Cubetto. We pretended the Cubetto was Snow White and we had to programme her to avoid the poisonous apple! We used different directions such as forwards, backwards, right and left. We also used the green screen to make video clips of the seven dwarfs chasing the evil queen away. 

This week Base 1 were very lucky to use a green screen and a robot called Cubetto with Mr Gerrie. We used the green screen to help us become Goldilocks and the 3 Bears and pretended Cubetto was Goldilocks searching for the porridge that was ‘just right’ . We had lots of fun learning new skills.

This week Reception have been continuing our Into the Woods theme through our story of the week A Chair for Baby Bear. The children did a super job of discussing the describing words used for the different types of chairs in the story and many enjoyed using the materials in our fine motor area to create pictures. We also found out that Goldilocks eats chocolate every day for breakfast, so we have written her a healthy breakfast menu!

We learned about numbers which join together to make 6 by using egg boxes (thank you for your donations) and Numicon in our Maths lessons; on Wednesday, during our Character Education lesson, we talked about recognising different emotions and times when we might experience them.

You may have noticed your child has changed to a different colour reading book – this is linked to their phonic assessment from December. Some groups have a photocopied sheet – this will replace a reading book until they are ready to start on the Read Write Inc books. We will be reassessing their phonic knowledge through a 1:1 assessment at the start of February, which we do every half term.

If you have any questions about reading, phonics, or any other aspect of the curriculum please let us know.

Wishing you a lovely weekend.

The EYFS team.