EYFS Newsletter – 22.10.26

Wow! We’ve reached the end of our first half-term in Reception! The past eight weeks have been fantastic as we’ve all got to know each other and settle into school life. We have enjoyed our first topic of ‘All About Me’ which has seen us learning about each other’s families, about our feelings and about our senses. This past week has seen us take a closer look at our bodies and how we can keep them healthy. We spent time labelling a diagram of the body with all the different body parts we know (and some we didn’t!) before looking inside to examine what our skeleton look like – with lots of children trying to piece together a large life size skeleton jigsaw. After this, we looked within at some of the crucial organs of our body and learned a bit about the jobs they do for us – the brain, lungs, heart and digestive system. We discussed how exercise keeps our heart healthy and strong and we all felt for our heartbeat at rest and then after a burst of activity, noticing how much faster it was beating after we’d given it a workout! There was also some discussion around what contributes to a healthy diet and why it’s important to eat a balanced diet. Some children had a go at sorting through some different foods by how much of them we should be eating as they talked about their favourite foods.

As we are swiftly approaching Halloween, we have had some spooky fun in Reception this week too! There was a lot of fun had making magic potions – with the children tasked to find ingredients based on their initial sound before adding the magic powder and reciting some magic words (all the while practising blending their phonics sounds into nonsense words). Sure enough, if the right ingredients had been added and the magic spell read aloud as the potion was mixed a magic spell was cast which saw Mr Verdi and Mrs Andrews briefly transformed into cats, snakes crows, pigs and frogs! Outdoors, we also challenged to children to help the witch from ‘Room on the Broom’ to find the right number of conkers, leaves, sticks and pebbles to throw into her cauldron (all the while practising their number recognition and counting skills!). On Thursday, Miss Kerr taught us a bit about the festival of Halloween and helped us compare it to a similar festival – Dias De Los Muertos, which is held in Mexico each year. Following this, the children really enjoyed colouring some bright and colourful ‘sugar skull’ artworks inspired by this ‘Day of the Dead’.

Phonics sessions this week have introduced the new phonemes ‘m’ (meatballs) ‘d’ (drum) and ‘g’ (girl). For each sound we learned the grapheme (what the written letter looks like) and how to form it. The children then joined in fun activities to practise hearing the initial sounds, building and blending simple words. The children had a go at taking an item of clothing and reading the simple word on it before putting them on and outside we used the ‘d-d-drum’ to beat out the individual phonemes to spell out and blend simple words.

In our Maths sessions this week, we have continued investigating the numbers 1, 2 and 3. To help visualise the different ways we can make 3, we used a part-whole model and the children have split up groups of 3 into two parts and had a go at writing the appropriate numerals. We also used the traditional tale of The Billy Goats Gruff to visualise how the number 3 can be split up. The children loved acting out the story with their friends and seeing how three can be split into 2 and 1 or 1 and 2 and still total the same.

Tuesday’s Spooky Halloween Disco was a great success and the children that attended had a fantastic time dancing around with their friends in the their fabulous costumes! Take a look at some of the brilliant fun we had in the photos below!

Thursday saw our last Forest School session of the half-term and we were blessed with crisp autumn sunshine! We wanted to take advantage of the beautiful coloured leaves outside at this time of year, so before we headed out we looked at the natural art made by Andy Goldsworthy with amazing shapes made with leaves. pebbles, sticks and pine cones. Out in the garden the children had a fantastic effort at producing their own natural artworks inspired by Goldsworthy – we had bright colourful leaf circles and love hearts as well as some wonderful pumpkin-headed people. We also had hidden around the garden a variety of spooky Halloween pictures like cauldrons, bats and spiders and asked the children to hunt them down, counting them on a checklist. Lots of children were also very excited to go on a bug hunt and spent time digging soil and lifting stones and logs, unearthing worms, slugs and  spiders. We also had the chance to visit the chickens and goats, with the children excited to discover a clutch of freshly laid eggs in the chicken run!

Have a lovely half term!

The Reception Team.

DATES FOR THE DIARY:

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 – Optional Reception Class Parents Coffee Morning – 9:00-9:30 – Come and join us for a coffee and an informal catch up with EYFS staff members.  

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