Reception have been learning all about penguins, where they live, what they eat and how they move.  We have been particularly interested the largest and heaviest of penguins,  the Emperor Penguin, because they spend their entire lives on the ice or in the surrounding waters of Antarctica.  We worked as a team on a very cold day, with a flurry of snow, to keep warm just like these penguins.  It was definitely warmer in the middle!

We had great fun using our  fine motor skills to roll and shape play dough to create the penguin character from our story ‘Lost and Found.’

In Reception this week we have been having great fun with shape, making symmetrical patterns and creating patterned mittens.  We used our find motor skills to colour in squares and rectangles, without crossing the lines, to produce pictures in the style of Piet Mondrian and had a go at using loom bands to make 2D shapes.   Mr Maker’s ‘I am a shape song’ on cBeebies was a big hit too!

The children have been finding all about ice – it floats, it contains lots of air bubbles and melts in our warm hands!  We discovered that salt also melts ice. We tested our knowledge about the conditions needed to form ice.  It was amazing to watch ice crystals form on the surface of a tin.  It looked just like the frost we see in our playground. 

Reception have become fantastic at counting reliably from 1 to 20 and beyond.  They are beginning to recognising the corresponding numerals and have applied their learning to stick the numbered snowballs in order.  We are so impressed with how many children can now work through the tricky teen numbers to order 1 to 20 independently.

To improve our icy palace the children decided that we needed snowflakes.  Here we are creating some sparkly ones!

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WOW! What a wonderful first week back we’ve had in reception!  The children have chosen a winter topic theme of ‘Is it Frozen?’ and Elsa’s icy touch has transformed our role play and small world areas.  See how much fun the children have had exploring the magical castle, getting ready for a banquet and making up new stories for the Frozen characters.

    Today we found out if we were on the good list when Father Christmas arrived.  We asked him lots of tricky questions about his reindeer and how he manages to deliver presents to all the children.  Father Christmas told us that we have to go to sleep early on Christmas Eve so that he has extra time for all his deliveries!

 The children in early years have been working very hard practising all their Christmas songs and dance routines ready for our Songs around the Christmas tree event.  On Thursday and Friday afternoon the children dressed up in their costumes and performed these songs in front of a live audience consisting of KS1, siblings and their parents/carers.

Well done boys and girls we are very proud of your professional performance.  A big thank you to all of the extra LHPSN staff for their help and support for the performances.  We had a great turnout, thank you to everyone who came along to support their child/children. Weren’t they all fantastic?

As part of learning about Diwali, we watched the story of Rama and Sita acted out using shadow puppets. We then explored how to make shadows.  We needed to place an object in front of the torch to create a shadow by blocking the light.  The children then experimented moving the torch and observed what happened –  if we moved the torch closer to our hand, the shadow got larger.