Reception - Hedgehogs, Badgers and Rabbits!
Our class texts this half term have reflected our learning around dinosaurs and covered a range of fiction and non-fiction books. Our reading skills have been predicting, clarifying, summarising and rhyme.
In phonics the children have continued to build upon their skill of reading ‘tricky words’, recognising individual letter sounds and blending them to read words. They are now beginning to learn digraphs and trigraphs (sounds containing two or three letters) in Phase 3 of our Little Wandle phonics scheme. They are now learning to read longer phrases and short sentences too.
Writing has followed our dinosaur theme also and many children have moved from writing short captions and phrases to writing short, interesting sentences. We have focused on using capital letters and full stops in our writing and some are beginning to use ‘and’ to extend their sentences also. Writing about the ‘Great Race’ when celebrating Chinese New Year has also been very inspirational! We are truly becoming writing superstars!
Maths
Our learning of Maths in Reception is lots of fun! We learn songs about different concepts, play games and use lots of practical ways to work on our Maths work each work. We understand that working with objects on a small and large scale is of central importance to our activities, and provides a good foundational grounding to our work. We use our outdoor classroom in our Maths work, in order to reinforce learning that we undertake in the classroom, at carpet time, and during activities in small groups. We link our learning to our Weekly wonder (topic) as much as possible – for example, our recent work on finding 1 more than a number to 10 found us feeding a mummy dinosaur an amount of ‘food’ and then feeding her baby dinosaur and amount that was ‘I less’. We find that this approach really does help in providing a ‘joined-up’ method to our class work, and provides lots of excitement and enthusiasm!
EAD
Expressive Arts and Design are vitally important to our learning in EYFS, Reception year. Our children have enjoyed exploring a wide range of media and genres across a range of our ‘Weekly Wonder’ Topics.
We have learned about the life and work of a number of artists, namely Alma Thomas and John Piper. We have looked at a range of their work and considered aspects of their Art that we like, the techniques that they have used, and how to create work using their work as an inspiration.
We have been creating pieces of Artwork using charcoal, collage and paint, and have incorporated working collaboratively with others, adding texture, creating and refining our work.
In our Music work, we enjoy songs spanning the curriculum areas, and learning these in class, as well as with our friends in Years 1 and 2 during singing assembly. Our use of instruments has incorporated exploring sound, keeping a steady rhythm, and making sounds to create a particular mood or effect. Our recent Dinosaur topic has seen us using our percussion instruments to reflect how different dinosaurs would have moved; fast or slow, loudly or quietly.
We thoroughly enjoy weaving the Creative Arts into different areas of our learning!
History (Understanding the World)
This half term we have been finding out about dinosaurs! To start our topic, and spark our curiosity, we welcomed a palaeontologist to school. As part of his visit we were able to become ‘mini-palaeontologists’ ourselves and uncover fossils, look at the relative size of dinosaurs from millions of years ago and meet a friendly baby triceratops! We enjoyed finding out how different dinosaurs ate and learnt to classify them as carnivores, herbivores and omnivores. We have spent some time learning about the famous British palaeontologist Mary Anning and how her life and work was so important in history. Our learning has included what a fossil is, how it was made, where to find them and the importance of treating with care. An ‘escape room experience’ was enjoyed by all three classes and various missions had to be undertaken in teams to uncover the identity of a dinosaur recently discovered in Dorset!
It really has been a fantastic journey to uncover the past!
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