We’ve been ‘down under’ this week in Reception as our ‘Around the World’ topic reached Oceania. The children have enjoyed learning more about Australia, New Zealand and a host of other island nations in the South Pacific. We travelled with the Go Jetters team to find out a bit about some famous Australian landmarks – Uluru, Sydney’s Opera House and The Great Barrier Reef – and, looking at each in turn, we discussed how some landmarks are natural and some are man-made. It was fascinating to dive into the ocean and see the beautiful coral reefs around Australia via the underwater photography on Google Earth and see close-up the fish and plants that find their homes there. Following this, some children were inspired to construct their own version of The Great Barrier Reef from a selection of loose parts to represent coral and sea creatures. Another one of our creative activities this week was given over to trying our hand at the traditional indigenous Australian art-form of dot painting with the children having a go at carefully making concentric dot patterns with colourful paint.
Mrs Andrews shared photos from her time living in New Zealand and showed us the incredible and varied scenery of the islands – from glaciers and mountains to tropical forested beaches. Whilst learning about New Zealand we heard about the indigenous Moari culture and their centuries-old tradition of tattooing called Tā Moko and how the tattoos typically show the bearer’s ancestry and status or to represent traditional stories. Many children then took on the challenge to carefully trace some examples of face tattoos in pencil.
On Thursday, we contrasted life in Leeds with some of the tiny island nations found in Oceania. We zoomed out from our school on Google Earth to see the surrounding city with it’s thousands of houses, it’s shops, factories, offices and busy motorways before travelling to the other side of the planet to compare this to the nation of Tuvalu which is made up of a series of islands and has a total population of around 10,000 people compared to the approximately 850,000 people that live in Leeds. We zoomed in on the island of Nukuleilei (one of the islands making up Tuvalu) which is home to only 341 people which is around the same number of children and staff at Cookridge Primary School. We saw how different life must be for the children who go to school on the island as there is no cars or roads and only narrow spits of land surrounded by expanses of ocean. To further consider the many islands that make up the continent of Oceania the children were presented each day with an image of people on different islands (such as Samoa, Tonga, Kiribati and Nauru) and encouraged to write a sentence to guess which island they were on. Those that correctly named the island were placed on a spinning wheel of names and the lucky winner each day got to pick a prize to take home.
As we finished learning new sounds in our Phonics sessions this week, we have spent this week revisiting some of the phase 3 sounds. The children have been rehearsing recognising the single letter phonemes in phase 3 to read words and phrases. We have also taken a step further in our independent sentence writing journey, with the children encouraged to use the sounds in words when writing their own simple sentences. To help with reading and writing fluency we have also spent time becoming more familiar with the high frequency ‘tricky’ words that cannot be phonically decoded (words such as we,he, was and you). The children enjoyed hunting for ‘pebbles’ in the ‘river’ with the words on and some even hunted for the letters to help them spell out these words!
Our Maths sessions this week have been lots of fun as we’ve been thinking about patterns! The children have had a great time making repeating patterns with cubes and counters, or by looking closely at the rotation of familiar 3D shapes. Most fun of all has been using the musical instruments outside to make repeating patterns with different sounds!
An exciting event took place across the school this week, as Mrs Koopman alongside Mrs Durrant and Mr Joy have been preparing a choral performance of Let It Go from the film Frozen to be entered into a nationwide competition. Many of the Reception children were brave enough to put themselves up for the audition process to try and win a place in the choir (and with over 150 children auditioning it was tough competition!) and we were very impressed by the fantastic singing and dancing we saw. Sadly, it was the older children in school who were chosen to fill the 33 spots in the choir, but we did get to get a close-up look at the video entry being filmed as our own class pet Tortellini had a cameo and part of the filming took place in our playground. A big well done to all those that took part in the auditions!
We’ve had some beautiful weather this week and Reception took advantage of the sunshine to get outdoors and have some fun up on the school field.
Have a lovely weekend!
The Reception Team
DATES FOR THE DIARY:
Thursday 2nd April: Foods of the World Parent Event (2:00pm) – Parents and carers are invited to join us in Reception to share in our learning and enjoy some delicious foods!
Thursday 2nd April: Last day of Spring 2 Term
Tinshill Drive
Cookridge
Leeds
West Yorkshire
LS16 7DH
0113 386 2500
