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 and we moved our bird table onto the field next to the outdoor classroom.

Most of our other activities this week centred around 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. The children watched it on http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-goldilocks.htm 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 our ‘Big Write’ lesson the children had to pretend to be goldilocks and write their own letter to say sorry. Charlotte remembered how to start a letter and lots of children wrote love from Goldilocks at the end. All of the children could identify the naughty things that she had done and many represented this by drawing after an initial attempt to say sorry.

In phonics the sounds taught and practised were ‘oa’ and ‘ar’. We looked at real words and ‘alien’ words and stories with these sounds in and practised writing words with these sounds in. The children are doing really well learning the diagraphs but find it harder to recognise them in words so please work on the word lists.

In maths we have been doing lots of work on using correct mathematical terminology. This is a requirement in the ‘Ages and Stages’ documentation. Through our practical maths we have been making sets with more and fewer objects, and using the language to compare height, length and mass.

Our work using the language of size to compare similar objects 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. For example Dan is taller than William but shorter than Raphael who is the tallest boy in the class.

Music was about Goldilocks and the children started to learn 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 Tuesday.

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 and a spot the bird 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. Our trip to Stevenage museum 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.