We’ve had a lovely first week back, with the first signs of Spring-like weather appearing at last! It was a great week to begin our new topic of ‘Around The World’ during which we will be exploring life on the different continents of Planet Earth. This week, we began by looking close to home at Europe and the UK. We talked about what the word continent means and found Europe on the world map. We discussed the word landmarks and thought of some that we had heard of, and while reading a book called ‘A Walk in London’ we took a tour of the capital via Google Earth street view taking in Buckingham Palace, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square and the Tower of London!
During the week, we have also been enjoying taking a look at some of the children’s own travel photos and discussing what it was like in countries all over, and how they differ from our own in climate, foods and culture. Reception are a well travelled bunch, with some amazing trips from Scotland and Northern Island to Mauritius and New Zealand (and all sorts of places in between!). We spent one topic session this week learning about where some of our favourite foods come from and in particular the origins of pizza and pasta in Italy. The children then enjoyed rolling some of their own pasta shapes from some herb scented play-dough and hand-crafting some delicious looking pizzas by following recipe cards that required them to practise reading the ingredients and counting out accurately the right number of each topping.
Our creative areas have been a hive of activity too with children taking on paper-cut collages inspired by French artist Henri Matisse and vibrant skyscapes inspired by the Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh. Many children also spent time honing their careful pencil control to accurately colour-in a selection of European flags. As an added bonus activity, Reception were gifted with some large carboard boxes after a delivery in school and Mr Verdi took no time in transforming them into the Palace of Westminster complete with the Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben and had a very enthusiastic team of helpers to paint it and add on some details. We have also had several children take to the DT area outside to craft their own models of different modes of transportation for travelling the globe (so far we’ve had planes, trains and automobiles!). On Friday, children had the chance to complete the first entry in their new “passports”, stating which countries in Europe they might like to visit!
Our Maths sessions this week have been spent exploring the concept of addition by combining two groups. The children investigated this idea by counting up dots on both sides of large domino, combining pairs of Numicon tiles, as well as taking inspiration from a story of animals being transported in trucks, and using blocks to represent this to combine two cargo loads on their own trucks.
In Phonics we’ve introduced the digraph phonemes ‘ar’ (star) ‘or’ (horn) and ‘ur’ (purse) with the children challenged to develop their skills in reading and writing words containing these sounds. Outside the children took part in a fun game of throwing bean bags into appropriate hoops to ‘win’ a word card which they then had to dash off and hunt for a matching picture card.
Thursday was our regular Forest School session and we had a relatively good day weather-wise for once! In relation to our ‘Around the World’ topic, we decided to test the children’s map-reading abilities and set them a challenge for using a map to find hidden letters around the field and gardens. If children were successful in locating all the letters they were able to spell out a word and win a team-point for their colour group! We also played a fun game of ‘corners’ using the points of a compass and enjoyed singing and dancing to ‘Never Eat Soggy Waffles’ as our mnemonic to help us remember North, East, South and West!
Have a lovely weekend!
The Reception Team
DATES FOR THE DIARY:
Tuesday 3rd and Tuesday 10th March: Parent Consultations (3:30pm-6:30pm) – Follow the link on the school website to book an appointment with either Mrs Andrews or Mr Verdi
Thursday 5th March: World Book Day – children invited to dress as a favourite book character.
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
