EYFS Newsletter – 16.10.26

What a fun time we’ve had in Reception this week! Our topic of ‘All About Me’ led us to thinking about our own bodies and how we experience the world via our senses. The children have loved engaging in discussions around how we see, smell, hear, taste and touch different things around us and how these can be important for our safety as well as our enjoyment. We had some different sense challenges on display for the children to try out such as a cups containing different things for the children to sniff without seeing them which opened up lots of discussion with a range of descriptive vocabulary. Similarly, there was a feely box in which we would place various objects for the children to touch and feel to try and work out what was hidden within (presuming they didn’t cheat by peeping through the hole on top!). We had a put out a few different noise makers for the children to experiment with and talk about how we hear different types of sounds. In our ‘curiosity cube’ we places a mystery object for the children to look at (but not touch) and asked them to think about what they can tell from just looking (materials it was made from, its weight etc.) before we revealed it to be an old manual coffee grinder. Of course then the children all loved getting the chance to have a try at grinding up some coffee beans by turning the handle. Finally on Friday, we asked some brave souls to try a blindfolded taste-test where they would try some foods without seeing them first and then describing what they tasted and guessing what it was. 

As autumn continues to show itself around school, we’ve brought in a lot of fallen leaves – we looked at the different colours and felt the different textures as they dry out. Lots of children had a go at using wax crayons to make rubbings of the various leaves in some lovely autumnal colours. We also had another use for the pumpkins we were weighing last week – we gave the children a bunch of colourful golf tees and some wooden hammers and stood back! There was loads of hand-eye coordination and muscle strength building in hammering the golf tees into the pumpkins. We even encouraged the children to think about their maths learning from last week and place the golf tees in repeating patterns (though this proved rather secondary to the fun of hammering away!).

In our phonics sessions over the past two weeks we have been revisiting the first six phonemes learned as part of Phase 2 of our phonics scheme (s/a/t/p/i/n). By repeating and rehearsing these newly learned sounds we hope to embed them more soundly and give the children chance to become confident in using these sounds in starting to build and read simple words. In small groups, the children have engaged in games and activities to practise recognising, hearing and identifying these sounds in words.

Our maths learning this week has been all about the numbers 1, 2 and 3. We began the week by practising how to write these numerals, and learning a little rhyme for each to help us remember how to form them all. We all had a go at subitising these numbers – quickly recognising an amount by sight and not counting it. Then in small groups the children have explored recognising different representations of the numbers 1,2 and 3; counted out groups of these amounts and finding Numicon number representations that match a given number. 

Have a lovely weekend!

The Reception Team.

DATES FOR THE DIARY:

Tuesday 20th October – Halloween Disco: EYFS and KS1 3:30pm-4:30pm – Information about tickets and event details can be found on the Halloween Disco 2026 website post.

Friday 23rd October – Parent Consultations – school closed to children. Appointments are available to book online for a meeting with the class teachers. 

Monday 2nd November – School reopens to pupils after half-term break 

Friday 6th November – Reception Class Parents Coffee Morning – 9:00-9:30 

Thursday 17th December – Reception Class Christmas Concert  – 14:30-15:00 – Families of Reception children invited to join us for a festive singalong.