Reception had lots of fun creating play dough animals this afternoon, adding feathers, shiny scales and spines as well as drawing their habitats. “It was fun and really creative,” agreed all of Reception.

What a wonderful Christmas production! Thank you to everyone who supported our ‘Songs around the Christmas Tree’ performance. The children were amazing with their beautiful singing and dancing. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

We had a fabulous day wearing yellow and spotty clothes along with our bear ears for the best dressed Children in Need competition.  It was great fun being able to use our knowledge of money to buy cakes and we even made some bear paw biscuits to take home.  The best news was that we  raised just over £90 – well done Reception.

This week the children have had a fabulous time celebrating Diwali, the annual festival of lights.  After watching a Cbeebies video clip explaining what Diwali is and how it is celebrated we took part in various activities; designing Mehndi and Rangoli patterns, making diya lamps, bhangra dancing and having an Indian feast.  The children enjoyed the shadow puppet show story of Rama and Sita (https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories/lets-celebrate-diwaliperformance) and how they found their way home.

Thank you for your support at the phonics workshop. We hope you found it useful. Please feel free to look at the phonics presentation on the website.

We have enjoyed starting the children off on their reading books and we hope you find the letter that we have sent home with tips for reading useful. We are continuing to practice our letters and sounds using the jolly phonics to become familiar with the phase 2 sounds. Some children are focusing on recognising and orally hearing and saying the sounds in s, a, t, p, i and n; others have been using them to write simple words. Please use this as a guide when exploring the songs or playing games on phonics play or other websites. You may also like to find letters around your home as ‘treasure’ or to make words using magnetic letters.

We enjoyed having our special grown ups into share our time at school with us. We enjoyed showing them our classrooms and the types of activities we get up to each day.

What fantastic story tellers we have.  The children re-told the story of The Three Little Pigs  following a story map and added actions.  Can you re-tell the story?

We have sequenced the beginning, middle and end of this story and used the story language ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘Happily ever after’.  Today we came in to find that Mr Muddles, our mischievous monkey, had rubbed out the end of the story map so we had to write a new ending. 

The big bad wolf chased the little pigs round to their brother’s house.

“Little pigs little pigs let me in,” growled the wolf.

“Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin” said the pigs.

“Please can I come in,” pleaded the wolf “I won’t eat you, I’m a nice wolf.”

When the pigs opened the door and he gave them a toothy smile …

and gobbled them up!

The wolf ate the pigs too quickly and threw them up.

The three little pigs ran, as fast as they could, back to Mummy’s house where they lived happily ever after.

Reception have used different shapes to build houses for the Three Little Pigs and the big, bad, wolf!  There were lots of extensions added to their designs so that the wolf could fit in too!

The children practiced their building skills, using hammers and nails, to create shape pictures  and their fine motor skills using bands and geoboards.

The children have really enjoyed investigating number and have explored different methods to count accurately.  We are beginning to match the numerals to  amount of objects. and love the number formation rhymes  (number formation rhymes).  

What a fabulous sight to see, lots of children engaged in literacy.  The children have been totally engaged in the reading area, talking about pictures in their chosen books and asking each other questions.  

This week we have been looking for the letters s, a, t and p.  Can you spot any in your environment?