Home » EYFS Newsletter – 13.11.26

EYFS Newsletter – 13.11.26

What a lovely week we’ve had in Reception! Our Toytown topic has continued to bring lots of fun – with many children enjoying sharing photos of some of their favourite toys with the rest of class. We have concentrated this week on thinking about the materials toys are made from such as plastic, fabric, wood or metal. We discussed as a class the various properties of these materials and what makes each of them suitable or unsuitable for certain types of toys. One challenge the children were given this week was to test out some different materials to decide which would make the best rain hat for Paddington Bear. The children did this by dripping water with pipettes over small plastic bears hidden in plastic cups beneath a covering of either plastic, cotton fabric, tinfoil or paper towel. Quickly it was discovered that the paper towels absorbed the water quickly and fell apart and the cotton fabric soon became sodden and allowed water to drip through onto the bears head. Both the tinfoil and the plastic sheets were discovered to be waterproof and keep the bears dry but most people agreed that the plastic would make the best rain hat as the tin foil ripped more easily so wasn’t quite strong enough.

Children also enjoyed working in pairs to share in completing some Toy Story jigsaw puzzles, making sure they communicated with each other well and used talk to organise themselves to join the puzzle pieces successfully. There was also a chance to test out segmenting to spell simple words by adding letters in the correct order to some toy monkeys. Last week’s maths work on 2D shapes was rehearsed by children having a try at adding circles and triangles to a rectangle base and create a rocket picture and then counting up how many of each they had used. Outdoors, we have the children chance to practise their aim in a bean-bag throwing game where the children were challenged to knock down as many cups as possible with 5 bags.

On Monday morning, Reception received a very exciting letter from the North Pole. Santa Claus himself has written asking the children for help in meeting his quota for toy robots this year as his elves are struggling to meet demand! Quickly, we transformed our DT area into an outpost of Santa’s workshop and the children have got busy! Each child will get chance to design and build a wooden robot toy – as and when they have had their opportunity to build we will be adding photos of the process to Tapestry. Take a look at what the busy little elves have been up to so far!

Phonics sessions this week saw us introduce the new phase 2 phonemes ‘e’ (egg) ‘u’ (umbrella) and ‘ck’ (duck). This means we have learned our first digraph – two letters that make one sound (ck as in d-u-ck). The children have all had some letter formation practise and then joined in activities to rehearse hearing, reading and writing these new sounds in simple words.

Our maths sessions this week have focused on the numbers 4 and 5. The children explored different ways that these numbers can be represented by sorting through picture cards and deciding whether they showed 4 or 5; they have investigated how numbers can be made up of other smaller numbers combined via acting out the song of ‘Five Little Speckled Frogs’; and they have practised careful counting of coins when role-playing buying toys for 4p or 5p in our toy shop.