Home » EYFS – Newsletter – 01/05/2026

EYFS – Newsletter – 01/05/2026

We’ve had a lovely, full and fun-packed week in Reception with lots of warm sunshine. Luckily for our growing topic, sunshine is just what we wanted! The children have been carefully monitoring the beans that they potted up last week and we’ve had a mixed bag of results with some beans growing handsomely and some yet to show a sprout. Fingers crossed some more will appear over the long weekend!

In class this week, a lot of our challenges have centred around chicks and eggs as we’ve still been taking care of the baby chicks that hatched last week. We all looked at the life cycle of a hen (and more importantly, we got to see some part of it first hand!) and the children were fascinated to watch a video that showed how the chick grew and formed inside the egg before hatching. Many children took on the challenge to put the stages of a hen’s life-cycle in order. We also handed over the very important job of naming our little chicks to Reception too and the children were asked to write down their suggestions in a sentence and pop it in the post box. We had a great many suggestions (many offering their own names or names of brothers and sisters!) and through some hands-up voting we settled on some great names for the little ladies (sadly, we are only able to keep the hens in school going forward and the male chicks have been returned to the farm). We were also inspired to create some wonderful fluffy chick artworks using feathered drinking straws to press the paint on to the paper, creating a textured effect before adding a beak and feet. We also set up a packing station for Cookridge Farm Eggs, staffed by willing volunteers from Reception who help to count out the right number of eggs for our customers using boxes to ten. The children were then able to record the number of eggs in tens and ones and sneakily develop their understanding of place value in two digit numbers too! We even had a chick-centric music stage this week, with many children having a whale of a time singing along to ‘Lay a Little Egg For Me’ and coming up with their own dance routines.

The children have loved getting to know the chicks and having opportunities to hold and stroke them. They have also had a fantastic close up look at just how fast the chicks are changing as they grow – seeing their wing feathers grow in and especially seeing just how much they can eat each day! The hens will be staying in class with us until they are mature enough to live outside and then they will make their home in Cookridge School garden and hopefully supply us with eggs for years to come! For now though, enjoy the pictures of Rose, Penny, Fox, Lucy, Rose, Nancy, Eggy, Fluffy, Popcorn, Noodle and Ice Cream!

To further develop the children’s understanding of seasonality in growing of crops, we all visited the school garden together to see what was growing up there. We first looked at the herb patch where children were invited to smell some of the fragrant leaves of mint, rosemary, thyme and chive plants before running through the other vegetable beds that contain peas, potatoes, lettuces, courgettes and cabbages amongst others. Over the coming weeks and months we will be able to visit the garden again and see things progress as these crops continue to grow.

Our phonics work this week has concentrated on revising the digraphs ‘oo’ (moon) ‘oo’ (wood) ‘ar’ (star) and ‘or’ (horn) and embedding our understanding of how to apply these sounds in reading and writing activities. The children’s particularly enjoyed reading different phrases and sentences and then drawing a picture to demonstrate their comprehension. Outside, the children loved running around seeking out hidden words to decode and read, and then decide if they were real or nonsense words! Inside we’ve been super impressed with the sentence writing that is being shown in the ‘golden’ books as the children become more assured in their own ability to write independently.

Maths sessions this week have focused on looking at shapes and in particular at how shapes can be manipulated by turning and rotating them to suit different needs and how a larger shape can be made up of a collection of smaller shapes. The children really enjoyed playing around with tangrams to place shapes in position and create animal pictures. Another activity asked the children to use Numicon tile shapes to fill in an outline, which needed some careful thinking to manipulate the pieces as they often needed flipping or rotating to fit. We also gave the children the opportunity to be more free and choose from a selection of shapes to come up with their own pictures to represent anything they could think if using different 2D shapes.