Learning about birds in reception this week

With the start of the ‘Big Schools’ Bird watch’ the children have been learning about different birds that we hope to see when the binoculars come out and we go bird watching next week. The children made bird cakes to encourage birds onto our school site. We will hang them out around the school site on Monday.

Most of our other activities this week centred on the well-known story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In literacy we have been reading different versions of the well-known story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Throughout the week we read books together under the visualiser, encouraging the children to read along and then discussed different aspects of the book and acted out the story with their puppets, joining in with the words that their puppet character said, doing the appropriate voices for the characters.

In phonics the sounds taught and practised were ‘ee’ and ‘ea’. We looked at real words and ‘alien’ words and stories with these sounds in and practised writing words with these sounds in. The children need to go through all of the white diagraph cards at least once a week to check that the diagraphs are being learnt and remembered.

In maths we have been using the language of size to compare sizes of children and objects. This work highlighted the need to move the children on from describing everything as big or little. There were also a lot of made up words being used eg biggerest! Lots of comparison work is needed using the language of small, smaller, smallest, long, longer, longest, tall, taller, tallest, heavy heavier, heaviest, light, lighter, lightest. We also looked at ‘positional language eg. In, around, in front of, next to, on, under, over, between, ,above, beside, behind,  Most children understand what the words mean but cannot always use them to describe where an object is in relation to another.

In music the children loved Goldilocks the Goldilocks rap!

Show and Tell was interesting when the children showed us their family photographs but they still need to practise speaking in loud voices when addressing a group. Not everyone is remembering to bring in what is required to show and talk about. Please remember that the children need one of their favourite toys for Show and Tell on Wednesday and be able to explain what it is, how it works and why it is their favourite.

In ICT we practised used a Goldilocks drag and drop programme in My World to practise mouse control. The children also programmed Bee-Bot to move around a Goldilocks and the Three Bears grid. A turn was incorporated and then moving on from a turn. If you have an I-pad, why don’t you download the free Bee- Bot app. There is one more session of programming next week before we move on to a new area.

Next week we continue our work about bears by looking at our teddy bears and bears in stories. Do not forget your teddy on Monday please as we will be using it for every subject and it will need to stay in school for lessons on Tuesday.

We are doing ‘old’ toys the week after next so dig out any old toys from your childhood, the older the better. Ask the grandparents! We promise to take great care of them.  Cannot go to Stevenage museum as they are having flood damage repaired , however they are coming out to see us in school, will introduce us to  old toys with a ‘hands on’ session to look at and investigate them.  We will make our own museum in the classroom afterwards.

Have a good weekend and we hope to see the children and a lot of teddy friends on Monday.