Week 16 in Class R

Class: Reception Year: 2022 - 2023

Good afternoon everyone, 

A big thank you to everyone who has offered to be a secret reader for the Reception children. It has been a great success so far and the children have loved guessing who it could be and listening to different types of stories. We look forward to lots more visits in the next few weeks. 

This week, the children have been learning all about Lunar New Year. We really enjoy learning about celebrations from different parts of the world and different communities. On  Monday, we looked at where in the world Lunar New Year is celebrated and emjoyed the story of the Great Race, learning about how we have the animals for different years. The children have learnt about spring cleaning and why lots of decorations are red. Next week, we are going to continue our learning on this and explore some music and dance. We will be performing our own drum beats and performing a dragon dance. 

In Phonics, we have learnt the phonemes ai (tail), ee (sheep), igh (light)  and oa (goat) and we have started our new reading groups. All children have a phonics lesson everyday and a reading session in small groups 3 x a week. We are working hard on learning our tricky words by sight. Please continue to work on these at home with your child. This week's tricky word focus were is as the I put pull full.

In maths, we have looked at positional language and ordinal numbers, linked to The Great Race story. We have been understanding about 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. We have talked about how this can be in a race, but could also be when we line up for lunch, who does a job and in which order, our daily timetable, etc. This is an important part of everyday life in Early Years as this provides structure and fairness in the children's lives. 

We have been practising our sentence writing this week around the theme of Lunar New Year. We are working on using our phonics / handwriting mats to help us and using finger spaces. Well done everyone; we have had some great sentence writing! 

In PE this week, we continued our Rock and Roll theme. We talked about the importance of warming up our bodies before exercising, how our core muscles help us balance and we practised a log roll. The children found this slightly harder than the pencil roll as it required more strength to turn our bodies over. This week, we were really pleased with how the children are coming on with their getting dressed skills. The biggest achievement is that they are all becoming more indpendent and willing to have a go at trying things themselves. We are becoming much more resilient. 

Unfortunately, Miss Wootton's daughter was poorly on Friday, so she was not there to upload this week's photos. They will be added on next week when I am back in. 

Well done Reception on a great week! 

We look forward to seeing you all next week. 

Miss Wootton and the Reception team