This term Reception have been very busy investigating weather and shadows. We enjoyed reading a story called The Black Rabbit about a very confused little rabbit who is scared of a huge black rabbit that keeps following him when it is sunny. We have enjoyed using the overhead projector and the torches to create our own shadow and explore how they change. On sunny days we drew our toys and friend’s shadows on the playground.
We have been finding out about endangered and extinct animals. Over the term we have had various animal visitors including a dodo, wooly mammoth and sabre tooth tiger. The children have loved building habitats and reading stories to our special visitors. We read some alternative versions of traditional stories such as ‘Old Mikamba had a farm’ and ‘We’re going on a lion hunt’ as we found out about different climates that animal’s habitat.
Towards the end of the term, we entered the classroom to discover a huge sea of plastic with some poor trapped turtles. We read lots of stories about plastic pollution such as Clean Up, Somebody Swallowed Stanley and the Tale of a Toothbrush. We brainstormed ideas on simple things we can do to help the ocean animals including bringing a reusable water bottle to school, putting our rubbish in the bin when we are outside and saving it to take home if there isn’t a bin and also using reusable bags when our family goes shopping to reduce the use of plastic in our precious world.
In Mathematics, we have become number bond champions! We love playing our number bond tennis and have become experts at identifying two numbers to make 5 or 10. Over the term we have been consolidating our knowledge of numbers to 10, simple addition and subtraction using part, part, whole and 2D and 3D shapes.
In Literacy we have continued to read our Read Write Inc phonics books and are becoming eager and confident readers. We have started writing simple sentences by segmenting the sounds we hear in a word and writing each of these down. We are working on remembering to use a capital letter at the start of our sentence, finger spaces between our words, a full stop at the end and reading our sentence back phonetically to ensure that it makes sense.
As always, we practice our good listening behaviours on the carpet, share our ideas and use our talk partners to learn how to take turns and show good listening by tracking our partner.