Week 16 in Class Ra

Class: Reception Year: 2022 - 2023

This week we have been looking into the culture and celebration of Lunar New Year and the story of the animal race. We explored where in the world this festival is celebrated, how families celebrate at home and in their communities, and we learnt all about the stories that tell us all about it. We spoke about where China is in the world and how we would get there. We then read the story of the race between the animals and acted it out. In Literacy this week we have been describing dragons and using adjectives to write our own sentences. The class also drew their own dragon.

In Phonics this week we have learnt the digraphs, ai, ee and oa. We also learnt out first trigraph “igh”. The children have read words with these new phonemes in and also spotted them in sentences. We have started our new reading groups this week in Phonics.

In P.E we have continued our gymnastics. We talked to the children about the importance of making ourselves strong and how improving your core muscles can help in lots of ways, but especially in gymnastics movements. We spent the first part of our lesson working on our core strength and coordination by working in pairs. Then, we moved on to learning all about the pencil roll and the log roll. In reception and at this early age, it is really important for the children to work on their core strength and stability too to help them to be able to hold their position to sit correctly at a table or on the floor to write. I was really impressed at how quickly the children got changed for P.E this week. Well done Ra!

In Maths we have looked at positional language in particular “on top” and “underneath”. We also started looking at ordinal numbers and linking this to the story of the animal race. We will be further exploring ordinal numbers next week. The children really enjoyed looking at Chinese numbers and even formed the numbers 1-5 with their fingers and on whiteboards.

In Music this week we have had a go at some Chinese drumming. We watched the drumming extract from the opening ceremony of the Chinese Olympics. The children then used drums and claves to practise beating out the rhythm. We all really enjoyed this!

On Friday we researched different Chinese languages – Mandarin / Cantonese and learnt how to say simple phrases – Happy New Year, Hello, goodbye. We then used our Mandarin "n? h?o" to answer our names in the register in the afternoon. We also enjoyed looking at the yellow teams show and tell on Friday. 

Have a lovely weekend and we’ll see you next week!