Home » EYFS Newsletter – 15.05.26

EYFS Newsletter – 15.05.26

We’ve been buzzing in Reception this week! As our topic of ‘Let It Grow’ has continued we’ve enjoyed lots of activities related to growing in plants and animals. Most fun of all perhaps was out outdoor obstacle course which was tackled by a series of bumble bees each carrying some of the ‘pollen’ from one flower. This involved children donning a pair of wings and a sticky helmet with which they were challenged to collect balls of ‘pollen’ and carefully manoeuvre over, under and through a variety of apparatus before dropping off the pollen at a neighbouring ‘flower’. Not only did this help further support the children’s learning around how flowers can be pollinated by insects, but also tested our a range of gross motor skills.

We also spent time talking about how other animals reproduce and looked particularly at the life cycle of a butterfly after reading the classic story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We saw some time lapse video of how the caterpillar build a chrysalis and watched it’s metamorphosis into a butterfly and how they reproduce and lay eggs for the cycle to continue on. Inspired by the ravenous caterpillar, the children sorted through the different foods he ate and discussed how healthy or unhealthy these foods are and how much of these foods we should include them and how often. The children also had a lot of fun with a reading challenge where they built a sentence from a collection of colour coded words and then reading it back and seeing the silliness that came out (example sentence: “The big train ate six red eggs.” We then even had the children practising their maths by doubling the spots on the wings of some butterflies.

In our creative area, we have encouraged the children to represent how a tree changes over the seasons and use a variety of artistic materials and processes to express the effects of the seasons in interesting ways.

In Maths this week, Reception have been learning about and practising how to use positional language as part of our unit on shape, space and measure. The children have discussed a range of terms such as above, below, left, right etc. and then had a go at some fun activities to apply this knowledge and develop a deeper understanding of it. We had a go at positioning a selection of 2D shapes to make pictures from verbal instructions; playing a barrier game with a partner to build matching towers from prompts using positional language; and even playing a game of bingo using positional language!

Our Phonics sessions have continued to revisit the previously learned digraphs and trigraphs to give the children further opportunity to get more confident in recalling them to apply in both their reading and writing. Practising seeing these multi-letter sounds when reading really helps with confidence and fluency so we have all had a go at blending sounds in words and phrases and finding pictures to match what we have read. The quality of written work is only improving week on week as the children become more secure in their application of sentence conventions, as well as using their known sounds to spell words more independently.

Of course, we have also been continuing to enjoy having the chicks growing in Reception, with our feathered friends getting bigger and stronger as the days pass. The children have loved having opportunities to study the chicks up close, holding them and even feeding them from their hands!