PRE-RECEPTION
We had a wonderful week in Pre-Reception. We were impressed by the children’s engagement in child initiated play and witnessed some fantastic imaginative play, too! We have continued with our activities based on Meerkat Mail. The children enjoyed our ‘meerkat’ tuff spot and used it to help them retell the story, using key vocabulary and actions from the story.
MATHS
In Maths, we have continued to explore the composition of 4. Through explorative play, the children are beginning to understand the concept that larger numbers are made up of smaller numbers. For example, 4 can be made up of 4+0, 3+1, 2+2, 1+3, and 0+4. They have investigated this concept by changing the colours of 4 spots on Lila the ladybird. We also had a ‘sports day’; the children threw 4 beanbags and counted how many landed in or outside of a hoop and played skittles, counting how many of the four skittles they managed to knock down. We have taught the children how to record their findings by making a tally chart.
PHONICS
In Phonics, we have taught the children to pronounce the sound ‘c’ (as in cat or kitten) phoneme (sound) using the rhyme ‘Open your mouth into a little smile; make your tongue flat and move it up towards the top of your mouth to say c c c ’.
For parents | Letters and Sounds (littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk)
Next week, we will learn to pronounce ‘e’. We will also start to encourage the children to listen carefully to the start of words and see if they can identify the initial sound – even if it is not the focus sound of the week.
RECEPTION
This week our adventures brought us a little closer to home as we travelled across Europe! The children have been busy exploring new places, learning new facts, and showing wonderful curiosity.
Understanding the World
Our journey took us to France, Italy and England. The children loved spotting each country on the map and revisiting places we’ve learnt about before. We explored their flags, discovered famous landmarks, and even talked about some of the delicious foods each country is known for.
Literacy
In Literacy, we encouraged the children to recall fun facts from our topic this term. They practised forming sentences that made sense, used their phonic knowledge to write them down, and then read their sentences back to check they were correct. Such fantastic writers in the making!
Phonics
This week, we reached an exciting milestone—we completed Phase 3 of our Little Wandle programme! We learnt our final phonemes: ‘er’ and ‘air’. The children practised saying the sounds, blending them in words like “f-air”, and using them in spellings. They also read and wrote short captions, such as “The chair was in the air.” Next week, we will be carrying out phonics assessments with all children. These will revisit all the phonemes and tricky words taught so far.
Maths
This week, we wrapped up our learning on 6, 7, and 8. We explored one more, one less, and simple addition within these numbers. The children also worked on explaining their thinking through true or false statements—for example: “I have 8 shells. If a crab takes one away, I will have 6.” They then had to decide if this was true or false and explain why—wonderful reasoning skills all round!
Expressive Arts and Design
The children impressed us with their creative talents as they used a range of materials to make fantastic representations of London landmarks. Inside the classroom we also explored the flags of Europe, using tissue paper, cotton buds, paint, and more to decorate our room with the flags of the countries we visited this week. It’s looking very colourful in Reception!
Find out more about Early Years here.
