This half term seems to be flying by, but each week the children amaze us by demonstrating even more determination and enthusiasm towards our learning.
It’s been lovely speaking with parents during our first parent meetings and sharing what has been happening so far. I know you all agree that we are at a magical point of the year where all of the children’s hard work and learning from the first term has come together and suddenly they realise they can read and write! Their understanding of maths continues to deepen and they are noticing more connections between numbers and amounts.
It really is a magical time in Reception!
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What have we been learning this week…
RE: This week in RE we continued our Lenten journey by reflecting on Palm Sunday. We have recreated this event through pictures and role play. We have continued to think about how we can feel closer to God during Lent and what acts of kindness we can do to show love for others.
Literacy: This week we read the story of ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’. We learnt new vocabulary: life cycle, ravenous, chrysalis, emerge, nutrition and metamorphosis. We used actions to help us remember our vocabulary and demonstrated our understanding by linking it to the story e.g. “the butterfly emerged from the chrysalis”. We drew pictures from the book and wrote our own labels for them.
Reception, can you retell the story at home using our new vocabulary?
Maths: This week in Maths we have been thinking about ordinality. We began by exploring 1 - 5 represented with blocks, we noticed that when in the correct order they resemble a set of stairs. We thought about why this was and noticed that each number increased by 1 each time. We linked this to the concept of 1 more than and used it to put numbers in the correct order and to find one more than a given number. When we explored the ordinality of numbers 6 - 10, we represented them with the blocks as '5 and a bit’ e.g.. we showed 8 as 5 and 3 more. Alongside putting them in the correct order, this also helped us to see the relationships between those numbers.
Understanding the world: This half term we have continued to investigate how different things change. We are continuing to look at our baby pictures to see how we have changed but this week, we took a closer look at ‘life-cycles’ and in particular the life cycle of a butterfly. This linked really nicely to our very hungry caterpillar story and we were already familiar with the stages and vocabulary. We have begun to make a large lifecycle to display in our classroom, complete with our own labels of course!
Let’s Celebrate…
This weeks learning character and virtue awards goes to:
Determined and Enthusiastic Learner: Bertie !
Bertie, your enthusiasm for learning has impressed us so much this half term. We can see how much you have enjoyed learning to read and write and how proud you are of your accomplishments. This week you have been both enthusiastic and determined with your writing and it really showed during drawing club. This enthusiasm and determination is brilliant Bertie, we are so proud of you!
Well done Bertie!
Determined and Enthusiastic Learner: April !
April, it has been lovely to see how inspired you have been when learning to read and write and how this has given you even more determination and enthusiasm than before! This week you did a fabulous piece of work about our very hungry caterpillar and we were so impressed with your phonics skills. Your determination and enthusiasm for learning is brilliant April, we are really proud of you!
Well done April!
Whole School Virtues - Loving and Compassionate: Dee-Dee!
Dee-Dee, when you play and talk to your friends, you do so with so much compassion. When you share their successes, you do it with so much love. We regularly see you congratulating someone in the class, celebrating their achievement and being just as proud of them as you would be of yourself. Celebrating others and being loving and compassionate towards them is such a wonderful quality. Thank you for sharing this within our class every day.
Well done Dee-Dee!
Lunch time awards:
We also have lunch time certificates which are awarded by the lunch time team to those children who they see being wonderful role models and using marvelous manors:
This weeks role model: Well done Mia!
This weeks marvelous manors: Well done Elijah!
Thank you both for being such wonderful role models and for remembering those acts of kindness everyday!
Important notices and reminders:
Polite reminder that the final parents meetings will be taking place on Wednesday 20th March. This is a great opportunity to discuss the progress your child has made and what we are focusing on as we move towards the end of Reception.
Polite reminder to please make sure all items are clearly labelled with your child’s names. We have a few of the same water bottles in class but with no names. This is causing some confusion and the children are getting their bottles mixed up. Thank you.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact Mrs Hartley
s.hartley@ourladystarofthesea.lancs.sch.uk
Have a lovely weekend
God Bless,
The Reception team