PRE-RECEPTION
Our chicks are growing fast and will soon be heading off to the farm. The children have enjoyed watching them begin to grow feathers and attempt to fly. They are always trying to climb on top of things and launch themselves off. We took them outside for a run-around, and Mrs Webster had to chase after them as they made a break for the fence. This amused the children greatly and did nothing to help!
We have continued our dinosaur topic. The children were archaeologists during the week and had great fun chipping away at rocks to find the dinosaurs inside. We are not sure they quite have the delicate touch needed, but they certainly enjoyed smashing the rocks!
MATHS
In Maths this week, we have explored the 3D shapes: cube, cuboid, cylinder, and sphere. As well as encouraging the children to use mathematical language to describe their properties, we have had great fun investigating curved surfaces and flat faces to build bridges.
PHONICS
In Phonics, we have introduced the phoneme (sound) ‘z’. You can hear this pure sound pronounced correctly at 39 seconds on the below video.
Phase 2 sounds for Autumn in Reception
RECEPTION
We have had a wonderfully creative week in Reception, and it has been lovely to see the children so engaged in their learning.
Understanding the World & Literacy
This week, the children have been learning a range of interesting facts about the animals we have been exploring. In addition to gathering these facts, they have been working hard to organise their ideas into clear sentences and then record them independently. A particular highlight was when the children were extremely excited to see the butterflies emerging from their cocoons this week.
Phonics
As we continue our Phase 4 learning, the children have been reading and writing longer words containing blends such as ‘bl’, ‘nd’ and ‘nch’. To support this, we have been reinforcing the importance of ‘chunking’ longer words to support their reading and spelling.
During our practical sessions, they have also learnt new tricky words: there, when, what, and one.
The children practised both reading and writing sentences, including dictated sentences such as: “The second chimpanzee got a present.” Once they completed these, they were then challenged further to use one of the new spellings in their own sentence.
Next week, we will be completing phonics assessments with all children. These will review all phonemes, tricky words, and learning covered this half term.
Maths
In Maths this week, we explored tangrams as part of our learning on ‘manipulate, compose and decompose’. Specifically, tangrams are made up of seven shapes, including triangles, a square and a parallelogram.
The children enjoyed experimenting with rotating and rearranging these shapes to create pictures. This activity supports their problem-solving skills, logical thinking, creativity, and spatial awareness.
