Author: Mrs Wood

It’s been another busy week in Reception!

Literacy
This week, we’ve been reading the traditional tale Jack and the Beanstalk. We had lots of fun using prosody when saying the Giant’s famous line…
FEE FI FO FUM!
On Tuesday, we all planted our own (magic) beans. We talked about what a bean needs in order to grow and the life cycle of a bean.

What’s a life cycle?

HA – Something that grows and grows.
AT – Something that goes round.
FlM – Something that grows day by day by day.
HM – A life cycle is like us.

After planting our beans, we wrote instructions to explain to others how they could plant a bean.
Maths
We’ve been learning about doubles!
The children are super quick at showing doubles on their fingers.
We used this stem sentence…
_____ is made of _____ and _____ ; double _____ is _____
when explaining double patterns.
We made doubles patterns on ladybirds, butterflies and with paint!

Help at home: Can you make a double pattern at home?

Challenges
This week, the chilli challenges were based on our focus story.

PE
Next half-term, PE will be changing to a Monday and Thursday. A coach from Foot-Tech is coming to teach us some football skills .

E-books
Your child will have an extra e-book on their account for you to read at home.

Poetry Picnic
This week’s was called Hungry Birdies. We used our gentle voices when saying the poem. Click here to watch our careful hand actions.

Reminders!

• PTA egg competition
  Please bring your decorated egg to school on Thursday 30 March.
• Reception coffee morning – Monday 27 March – 9am – 10am
• Learning journey drop ins – Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Thursday 30 March

Maths
This week, we consolidated our understanding of the composition of numbers by investigating the numbers within 7. We investigated the whole number using the part–part–whole model, e.g. 5 is a part. 2 is a part. 7 is the whole. 

A key focus was partitioning 7 (splitting it into parts) and thinking about the missing part. We used cubes and Numicon to explore this.
Phonics
This week, we continued to read and write longer words including words ending in -ing.
Help at home: Can your child use their phonemes fingers to write these words: looking, marching, farming, waiting, morning, winking, singing.
Every morning, after doing their morning jobs, the children do a morning activity. This week, they’ve been writing sentences about interesting pictures. We’ve been very impressed with their independent writing!
RE
On Tuesday, we learnt about another spring festival called Vaisakhi. Sikhs celebrate Vaisakhi. It usually takes place each year on either the 13th or the 14th of April. After watching some videos about how Sikhs prepare and celebrate Vaisakhi, we created some saffron (orange) kites, as saffron or orange play a large part in Vaisakhi celebrations.

Next week, we’ll be learning about Eid and how this festival is celebrated.

Outdoor fun!
Reminders

• School trip – Friday 24 March
• Reception coffee morning – Monday 27 March – 9am – 10am
• Learning journey drop ins – Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Thursday 30 March
• Every Monday, we share  photos from home. If your child has any new interests or has a ‘WOW’ moment at home, please email  [email protected].
  We love to share these moments!

 

As always, it’s been a very busy (cold!) week in the Reception classroom. From making ramps in the construction area to creating our own junk-model vehicles, we’ve had another fun-filled transport week.

Literacy
This week, we continued our transport theme by reading The Hundred Decker Bus by Mike Smith.
After reading the story, we created our own Moortown bus. We had some fab ideas: a deck with a ice cream shop, a chocolate factory deck and a deck with a gym to keep us strong! Our bus doesn’t have one hundred decks (31 to be precise) but there is one deck created by each member of Reception.
Click here to view our bus.

DT
This week, the creative area has been a very popular area. We’ve had lots of fun joining materials to create junk-model vehicles.

Science
In the construction area, we’ve been making ramps and watching how far the vehicles travel.
PE
This week, we continued to learn all about throwing at a target. We practised aiming at targets of different heights and distances. At the end of our sessions, we applied our throwing skills when playing partner games.

Snow, snow, snow!
This afternoon, we had lots of fun in the snow. We enjoyed making snow angels and snow people.
Reminders

• York Railway Museum – Friday 24 March
  We are really looking forward to our first school trip!
• Reception parents’ coffee morning
  Monday 27 March – 9.00am-10.00am
• Learning Journey Drop In’s
  Monday 27th March – 3.15pm – 3.45pm
  Tuesday 28th March – 9.00am – 9.30am & 3.15pm – 3.45pm
  Thursday 30th March – 9.00am – 9.30am 

For World Book Day 2023, we enjoyed reading with the Year 3 children and doing some drama. The children were put into small groups and given a traditional tale book. They amazed us with their team work and acting skills!
We were also lucky to have some of our parents and grandparents join us for a stay and read session this morning- thank you to those who could make it.

Literacy
We continued our transport topic by reading The Hundred Decker Rocket by Mike Smith. We designed our own deck and wrote a sentence about our design. We also watched a video of first moon landing and looked at some rockets from the past. Ask your child if they can remember the names of:

• The first person in space.
• The first dog in space.
• The first man to land on the moon.
  Maths
  This week, we continued to engage with activities that focussed on the purpose of counting – to find out ‘how many’ objects there are. We revisited the concept of cardinality – the idea that the last number in the count tells us how many things there are altogether.  We also looked at the staircase pattern. This pattern has helped us develop a clear understanding that each number has a value of 1 more than the previous number, and 1 less than the following number. We used the below image of the Numberblocks, alongside the our fingers, to represent ‘5 and a bit’ quantities, which will help to embed this key understanding.

On Monday, the children enjoyed their music session with Miss Gaunt. They listened carefully to a song called Golden and responded with rhythm, gesture and emotion. Click here to watch them sing the song.

Poetry Picnic
This week’s poem has gone down with a BAM! Click here to POP away with us.

RE
This half-term, we’re learning about different religious and cultural celebrations. Last week, we learnt about a carnival that happens in places like Brazil and other South American countries.
This morning, we learnt about a Hindu festival called the Holi Festival. After watching a video about how Hindus celebrate this festival, we had to have a go at getting (a bit) messy ourselves! Click here to watch some snapshots.

Take a look at some of this week’s chilli challenges:

 

Reminders 

• Learning Journey Drop Ins –
  We’ve had to slightly change the dates/times for some of these. Here are the new dates/times:
  Monday 27th March – 3.15pm – 3.45pm
  Tuesday 28th March – 9.00am – 9.30am & 3.15pm – 3.45pm
  Thursday 30th March – 9.00am – 9.30am
• Please make sure you are writing in your child’s reading record book every week.
• Library books must be returned every Friday.
• Please continue to bring in recyclable packaging for us to use in our creative area.

This week, our Living and Learning is I know we’re all the same and we’re all different. We watched Elmer and talked about what is different about Elmer and the other elephants. We thought about how Elmer might feel about being different from the other elephants.

SS – Elmer is different colours and the other elephants are grey.
HM – I think Elmer feels fine because he’s just different.

To end the session, we celebrated the differences which exist between our friends and family.

TH – My Dad doesn’t have any hair and I do.
SB – I wear a bangle.
AS – I was born in Pakistan.
AP – It doesn’t matter if you have different skin colour to everybody else – it’s ok.
HA – Seb and I have brown eyes.

Pancake day
On Tuesday, we learnt all about Shrove Tuesday. We talked about some of the traditions that happen in the United Kingdom. One of the traditions we liked was the pancake racing that happens in Olney, Buckinghamshire. Of course, we had to have a go at doing this ourselves! Click here to watch our races.

One of our chilli challenges this week was to make playdough pancakes and write a list on ingredients.

This week’s poem was Pancakes by Christina Rossetti. On Tuesday, we created a tally of pancake toppings. We also enjoyed eating pancakes and saying the poem. Listen out for our fantastic use of prosody.

Class assembly
Thank you to all the parents/carers who came to watch our class assembly. All the children spoke loud and clear when saying their lines. We’re so proud of all of them. We hope you enjoyed watching it as much as we enjoyed practising it.

Phonics
This half-term, we’ll continue to review and revisit phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs. We will practise reading words with:
– double letters (h-a-mm-er)
– two or more digraphs (ch-a-tt–er)
– ending in –ing (l-oo-k/i-ng)
– s /z/ in the middle (visit  sounds like v-i-z-i-t)
– s /s/ /z/ at the end (c-oo-k-s)
– es at the end (t-or-ch-es)

There’ll be no new tricky words this half-term. We’ll continue to recap all the phase 2 and 3 tricky words.
Help at home:
Practise reading and writing all of the phase 2 and 3 tricky words.

Reminders

• World Book Day stay & learn session – 9.00am-9.30am
  Come and read a book with your child. You’re child is more than welcome to bring in their favourite book. We alternate years when we dress up – this is not a dressing up year.
• Don’t forget to write in your child’s reading record every week.

Please!
Our children love to do junk-modelling in our creative area. They love it that much I can’t keep up with them! It would be great if you could bring in a selection of recyclable packaging.

 

This week, we’ve been learning all about real-life superheroes. We read non-fiction texts about police officers, firefighters, dentists, paramedics, doctors, vets and more. Our focus story was The Great Fairies of the World. We designed our own fairies and wrote sentences about their jobs.
This morning, we had a real-life superhero come to visit us! We listened carefully and asked lots of questions. We were so excited when we saw the police van pull into our playground.
In maths, we explored length. We cut a piece of ribbon as long as our arm and explored finding things in the environment that are longer, shorter or the same length.

We also used different objects of equal length to find out how long we are. We made sensible predictions and then checked to see if we were right by counting them.
Yesterday, we made a height chart to see who is the tallest.
We carried out a colouring mixing experiment and watched the primary colours (red, blue, yellow) travel up the kitchen roll to make a secondary colour.

The Bee-Bots have been a big hit this week! We’ve loved programming them and watching them move around our classroom.

Reminders

• Class assembly – Wednesday 22 February, 2:40pm – 3:00pm
• World Book Day stay & learn session – Thursday 02 March, 8.50am – 9.30am
• Comic Relief: Red Nose Day – Friday 17 March
  Your child can come to school in non-uniform.
• Learning Journey Drop In’s – Tuesday 28 March – 8.50 – 9.30am or 3.15 – 3.45pm & Thursday 30 March – 8.50 – 9.30am or 3.15 – 3.45pm

Lexia
To login into the Lexia app, please use moortowneyfs@spherefederation.
Once you’ve done this, you should be able to login into your child’s account using their login details.

Finally…
I can’t believe we’re half-way through the year!  The children are thriving with their learning. They are becoming confident independent learners.

Thank you to all who attended the parent-teacher meetings this week. It was lovely to share the children’s wonderful achievements.

As always, I hope you all have a happy and healthy half-term break. Don’t forget to send me an email of what you get up to. I look forward to seeing you all again on  Monday 20 February.

Have fun and keep reading!

Literacy
We continued to read Supertato. We created wanted posters to try and help capture the Evil Pea. We thought of sentences to describe the Evil Pea.

He is green.
He is round.
He has a red cape.
He wears a black mask.
He is tiny.

Once again, the Evil Pea has been up to mischief! We’ve been super building traps in the construction area. The children came up with some fantastic ideas! Some of the children drew a picture of their traps.

Maths
We’ve been learning about weight. We used balance scales to compare the weight of different objects.

Art
We looked at some of Yayoi Kusama’s famous dot paintings. Yayoi is a Japanese artist who is sometimes called ‘the princess of polka dots’. Although she makes lots of different types of art – they have one thing in common, DOTS! In the creative area, we had fun creating our own dot paintings using cotton buds and bubble wrap.

Poetry Picnic
This week’s was called Mrs Bluebird. The children particularly liked being Mr Bee!

Outdoor learning
The wind didn’t stop us from having fun outside.
Early writing
A short presentation by Mrs Payne, one of our Sphere Federation Reception teachers has been emailed to you this week. The presentation explains how writing develops over the Reception year and has some ideas of things that you can try at home to support your child’s learning. If you have any questions about the presentation, please ask.

Reminders

• Parent-teacher meetings – Monday 06 & Tuesday 07 February
  I look forward to chatting to you all in person next week.
• A new e-book is assigned every Thursday. Please make sure your child reads this daily at home.
• Library books must be returned every Friday.

Finally, thank you to all of the parents and carers who came to the fiddly fingers stay & learn session today. It was lovely to see so many of you! We hope you all enjoyed it.

This week, our Living and Learning was ‘I know how to seek help’. We talked about different scenarios and how/who we would ask for help.

AP – I would ask a teacher.
MB – I would ask my Mummy and Daddy.
SSK – I would ask the police.
TH – I would ask my neighbour.
FlM – I would ask someone who works there who is wearing a hi-vis jacket or wearing uniform.
DD – I would ring 999.

Supertato took over our classroom this week! The children have loved reading this story. On Tuesday, the children noticed the veggies taped to a table with pictures of the Evil Pea all over the writing area. Just when we were about to start reading the book, we found a letter from the Evil Pea.
On Wednesday, the Evil Pea had been up to his mischievous tricks again! The veggies were trapped in a shopping basket hanging on a door!

All week the children our new role play area has been very busy with  determined superheroes trying to solve the crimes and capture the Evil Pea!

Super writing!
Every morning, the children have a morning activity to do before phonics. We’ve been super impressed with their amazing sentences this week.

Maths
In maths, the children continued to develop their understanding of composition, or the numbers within numbers. We used the Hungarian number pattern (die pattern) to  explore ways to represent numbers. By using this die pattern, it is helping the children understand  the ‘5-ness’ of 5.
We started by sing the ‘5 Little Aliens in a Flying Saucer’ song to help us see remember the pairs of numbers that make 5.  When another alien joined the gang, they quickly realised there was no space! FlM said, “We need to build another spaceship.” Therefore, we used a double dice frame to begin to explore 6 and 7 as numbers that are composed of ‘5 and a bit’.

Music
This week, the children learnt all about robots and made their own robot to use next week in music.

AT – They might be used to help people.
TH – They do what you say.
JQ – You can control it.
FiM – A robot could help you with your shopping.
MB – I would put a button on to move it.
SL – I would put hands on my robot so it can do the cleaning.
SS – I might use a remote control.
AS – I would put legs on my robot.

Poetry Picnic
This week’s poem was an eight-line poem called A Little House. We highlighted lots of digraphs, trigraphs and tricky words when reading the poem.
Reminders

• Fiddly Fingers Stay & Learn – Friday 03 February 8.50am-9.30am
  No need to sign up just come and join in with some fun finger gym activities.  Due to limited space, only one adult per child can attend this session. 
• Parent-Teacher meetings – Monday 06 & Tuesday 07 February
• Class assembly – Wednesday 22 February – 2.40pm – 3.00pm