Week ending 19th April

Welcome back to our final term in Reception - can you believe it?!

We have had a great first week back and the children have returned with renewed vigour and enthusiasm for playing and learning in our lovely environment.  We have already begun to enjoy the outdoor environment a little more and hopefully the weather will continue to improve to allow more of this.
This half term we are learning through the topic of 'growing'.  This includes learning about plants and flowers; animals and lifecycles; keeping fit and healthy to grow well and we are planning a school trip as part of this theme to learn about bees and minibeasts.
 
Phonics
The children are making very good progress with their reading and writing and we see them applying their learning much more across the day.  The expectations have increased and the children now spend up to 45 minutes in a formal phonics lesson.  They are coping with this well and this is a good way to get them ready for year 1 which really isn't far off now.  Your continued support at home is appreciated with the greatest benefit coming from reading with your child listening to them and reading stories to them.
Drawing Club
All children now take part in drawing club every day.  The focus text this week has been farmer duck which the children enjoyed joining in with "How goes the work" and "Quack".  I love talking to them as they draw and describe their imaginative ideas!  Their 'adventure codes' are becoming more adventurous now as they apply the words and sounds they have learned.
Maths
This week in maths we have been learning one to one correspondence when counting to 10, understanding the importance of counting carefully without counting the same object twice or repeating or missing numbers.  As well as this, we did some measure learning in the context of mass(weight).
Learning through our Topic.
We have had fun with our learning this week including painting, modelling, cutting and sticking and drawing flowers and plants.  We have planted seeds (conkers) to see if they will grow and dug up weeds to observe the parts of a plant.
We have also been outside to observe minibeasts and see what else we can see growing in the outdoor area.
RE, Music and PE
In RE we began thinking about special places by sharing our favourite places as well as the places where we feel safe.  One of the children's favourite places was the park and this provided a link to our PE lesson where we pretended to be at the park for our warm up before learning to jump in different forms/shapes.  Our music this half term is all about exploring sounds and this week we began by exploring the different sounds our voices can make.