Reception

Spring 2

Week 5

We’ve had a very busy last week in school. We have really enjoyed finishing off our topic about the farm by learning about the lifecycle of a chicken, making chicks out of playdough, pretending to milk a cow, sheering sheep, playing in our farm role play and weighing different materials that can be found on a farm (wool, hay, straw and feathers). We also learnt about wheat and made our own bread. It tasted delicious!

We also spent a lot of time thinking about the Easter story. After watching the different performances every day in the hall, we then learnt more about each story in class. On Monday, we looked further into Palm Sunday and made our own donkey craft,. On Tuesday, we learnt more about the Last Supper and re-enacted this in class. On Wednesday, we looked at the events in the Garden of Gethsemane and created our own prayer books with the Lord’s Prayer inside. Finally, on Thursday, we learnt more about the crucifixion and the resurrection and created some special crosses using tissue and chalks. 
We also enjoyed designing our own Easter eggs and having an Easter egg hunt in the Reception garden!

Week 4

We’ve been excitedly preparing for our Easter play this week and have learnt lots of songs to sing in the performance. We have also been continuing our learning about the farm, finishing off our ‘Three Little Pigs’ work and learning about doubles in maths. As an extra challenge, the children were asked to remember the work they did on repeating patterns and create a repeating pattern pasta necklace. They all did a great job!

Our Think Equal book this week has been Nisha and the Tiger. Find the home workbook here. 

Week 3

All week, we have been asking when it is time for our trip to Smithills Farm so by the time that Thursday finally came around, we were very excited! We had so much fun riding donkeys, seeing lots of different baby animals, holding some baby animals, feeding cows and sheep, going on a bumpy tractor ride, watching the cows being milked and of course going on the park! It was a fantastic day and the children all had a wonderful time. Thank you to all of our parent helpers!

Our Think Equal book this week has been Yoshi is Different. Please click here to access the Home Kit.

Week 2

We have been working really hard to learn our songs to join in with the performance of Jack and the Beanstalk. We all had a fantastic time!
 

*We have been learning songs in all available slots therefore there is no Think Equal book for this week or last week.

Take a look at our amazing world book day costumes too! Thank you for putting in all the effort!

Week 1

We found a very important letter in our classroom this week. It was from Mummy Pig. She asked us to find out if her piglets were alright as a big bad wolf had been spotted in Fairytale Land. We went outside and discovered lots of straw that had been blown over. We also found lots of sticks that had been blown over too. We came back inside and started to get very busy writing lost posters and letters to mummy pig. Lots of us thought we saw the big bad wolf in our Reception playground! The next day, we came to school and saw a new book on Mrs. Winterhalder’s chair. It was the story of The Three Little Pigs. We read it and knew that the pigs were safe. We began to learn this story for our Talk for Writing. 

Thank you to everyone that came to our Mother’s Day brunch. We all had a wonderful time!

Spring 1

Week 6

We have really enjoyed our last week of the half-term. We’ve been really busy completing assessments but aside from that, we have also celebrated Shrove Tuesday, Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. 
 

As we have been doing assessments, we have not done Think Equal this week. 

Week 5

We’ve had a lovely week this week. We’ve been busy creating on our potions and writing ingredients lists for our own magical spells. We also had a fantastic time celebrating Lunar New Year. We made dragon masks and puppets, we practised writing Chinese numbers in the tuff tray, we painted pictures of cherry blossom, made paper lanterns, played with characters from the zodiac and made up our own dragon dances. We learnt about how people celebrate Lunar New Year, the story of the zodiac and why people wear the colour red.

Our Think Equal book this week is called Passing Clouds. Find the home kit here. 
 

We also had a great time at our school disco!

Week 4

We’ve been learning about birds this week, ready to take part in the School’s Big Birdwatcher next week. We made bird feeders using orange halves, learnt facts about British birds and drew pictures of birds too. 
 

We also enjoyed taking part in NSPCC number day and loved baking Numicon biscuits in the shape of number 5 to link in with our learning on number bonds to 5.

During Think Equal this week, we have focused on circle time activities. Therefore, there is no home kit for this week.

Week 3

This week, we continued to learn the story of Room on the Broom, and have begun to create our own version. We have used small characters to retell the story and completed some simple sentence writing about the witch. 
In our Maths lessons, we have begun to work on number bonds to 5, learning that 2+3, 3+2, 1+4, and 4+1 make 5. We completed lots of different activities around this and the children are beginning to remember the bonds. 

We have continued to learn more about Castle life in the past. This week, we learnt about the different jobs that people did in castle times and we started to act out these roles in the role-play area. Everyone agreed that they wouldn't have wanted to be a gong farmer!!

We also completed lots of challenges in the class, including making bridges for castles in the construction, mixing colours on filter paper snowflakes and matching amounts to the correct numbers. 

Our Think Equal story this week has been Thabo and the Trees. Find the matching home kit here.

Week 2

Snow came to St Gilbert's! We had a really fun few days exploring the snow and ice in our playground. We worked together to create snowmen and they turned out brilliantly! The children all showed fantastic teamwork and problem solving skills. 

This week, we also worked on ordering numbers to 5 and learning that understanding that each time the next number is added, it is 1 more than the previous number. As well as this, we continued our learning on weight and used balance scales to compare the weights of different fruits and vegetables.

We also received a letter from a witch this week who asked us to find some of her missing items. We found all of them in our Reception garden and returned them to her after which she sent us a book to read: Room on the Broom. We have started to orally retell the story and the children have worked really well!

Our Think Equal story this week has been Biyu the Brave Pea. You can find the home kit here.

Week 1

We’ve had a fantastic first week back. The children have settled straight back into our usual routines and they have worked really hard.

We have introduced our new topic of ‘castles’ and the children have loved playing in our new role-play and small world areas as well as completing different challenges related to this theme. Some of these have included making a dragon with playdough, making a 2D shape castle, making castle walls with battlements in the construction area and ordering castles in order of size. In maths, we have been using snowman skittles and subitising how many we knocked over, playing dice games and creating our own subitising cards. We also started learning about weight, pretending that we were human balance scales and using real balance scales to compare the weights of objects in the classroom. We have now split the class into groups for Read, Write, Inc. and each group is moving at a different pace to support the needs of the children therefore, all children are now working on different sounds and words.

Please take a look at the letter here to explain more about Think Equal at home. This week, we have used the book Faisal's Not Himself. Please click here for the home kit linked to this book. Remember that this is an optional activity.

Autumn 2

Week 8

We’ve spent our last week of the term doing lots of fun activities. We really enjoyed our key stage Christmas party and had fun playing lots of games with our friends in nursery. We also tried some different Christmas foods, (mince pies, chocolate Yule log and panettone) and talked about the different tastes. We completed different challenges including making CVC words on snowmen, creating play dough Christmas trees, cutting snowflakes out of paper, following a recipe to make reindeer food, recognising numbers to make gingerbread men, making hot chocolates in our mud kitchen and using flour to dust snowmen shapes on the floor, adding decorations for buttons, eyes and a nose. 
 

Happy Christmas everyone!!

Week 7

This week was our Christmas Nativity performance. We have worked extremely hard on this over the past few weeks and the children all had a great try on the day! We also really enjoyed eating our Christmas dinner with our friends on Wednesday. Our favourite part of the week was our class trip to The Lowry to see We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. All of the children loved it (especially the coach trip and the snacks)!!

Week 6

we had a really fun week this week. We have embraced the Christmas spirit with lots of activities in class. During our maths lessons this week, we have made snowman soup! We counted each of the items that we put in and made mini recipe cards for others to follow. We have continued to work on making cvc words on magnetic boards and have been having a try at writing them on paper too in our phonics lessons. We have also had fun making our own stick men using twigs and pipe cleaners as part of our outdoor activities. 

Week 5

Christmas has come to Reception! Two very cheeky elves appeared in our class and tied Parsley to the Christmas tree! We managed to rescue him then we showed fantastic teamwork and problem solving skills when decorating the tree. We have enjoyed playing in the new Father Christmas workshop role-play area and our new frozen small world area which our elves kindly created for us. 
 

In other news, this week we have continued our phonics, learning the sounds x, ng and nk. In maths we have been looking at different ways to make 4. We also went on a short walk to find Jack Frost. He had been in our school playground and made lots of things frosty! We created a little book of all of the things that we found. 

Week 4

This week, it was Parsley’s birthday! We celebrated by making birthday cards, having a tea party and eating birthday cake. We learnt more about what a birthday is and why we celebrate them and linked this to advent and preparing for Jesus’s birthday. 
 

We also had a fantastic visit from Mr. Stix. We loved his magic tricks and enjoyed joining in with some dancing. 
 

We have continued our phonics, learning the sounds z, ch and q. In maths, we have been learning the number bonds to 2 and 3. 

Week 3

We've had a busy week completing assessments this week but we have enjoyed learning about Diwali as part of our learning on different cultures and celebrations. We created colourful rangoli patterns, painted rangoli bookmarks, made diva lamps and learnt the story of Rama and Sita. 
 

We also really enjoyed our music lesson with Miss Rust (from MAPAS). The children will be receiving a weekly music lesson until Christmas. 

Week 2

This week, we have continued our learning on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks sent us a basket of porridge ingredients along with a recipe book to make our own porridge. Yum! We looked at the instructions and worked on writing our own simple instructions for making porridge. 

In Maths, we have been learning about more and fewer: who has the most/ who has the fewest? We have used lots of different scenarios to explore this. 

We have also learnt about Remembrance Day. We created our own poppies using different materials, made stained glass poppies and attended the whole school flag raising ceremony. 

Week 1

It has been lovely welcoming the children back to school after the half-term break. We've had a busy week, starting our new topic 'Into the Woods' along with our new Talk for Writing book 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'. We have sequenced pictures of the story, retold the story with small world characters and acted out the story with masks. In our Maths lessons, we have been learning about the number '5' and have started to look at number bonds to 5 (i.e. 3 and 2 more makes 5, 4 and one more makes 5 etc.). We have also been learning about Bonfire Night. We have made firework pictures, told stories with the bonfire small world, made edible breadstick sparklers, learnt about why we celebrate Bonfire Night and talked about how to keep safe when we go to a firework show. 

Autumn 1

Week 7

We really enjoyed welcoming our grown-ups into our class for our Pray, Stay and Play session this week. Thank you to everyone who came. We’ve been learning about God’s World in our Religion lessons and loved taking part in different activities around this theme with our adults. 

In our Read, Write, Inc. lessons this week, we have learnt the sounds f, e, l and h and in our Maths lessons we have focused on more and fewer. We have also been creating our own versions of Naughty Bus in our Talk for Writing sessions.

Week 6

We’ve had a really fun week in Reception this week. On Monday, it was our first trip. We went to Winton Park, collected some autumn treasures and had a play on the park with our friends. We talked about our treasures later on in the week and we were all really interested by the different things each of our friends had collected. 
 

We have also continued to learn some new sounds and completed different activities around these sounds. Our sounds this week have been c, k, u and b. In our Talk for Writing work, we have started to innovate the story of the Naughty Bus, creating our own class version: Naughty Taxi! We will be continuing to work on this next week. In maths, we have been learning about the number four and have started to look at number bonds to make 4 (I.e. 3 and 1, 2 and 2). 

Week 5

This week we have been learning about shapes in maths, specifically focusing on squares, triangles, circles and rectangles. We compared the shapes and looked at how many sides and corners they each have. We painted shapes, used shape cutters in playdough and made shapes using different materials. We’ve also been looking at the number 2 and number 3 and have made collections of objects using these amounts. 

In our Read, Write, Inc. lessons, we have learnt the sounds n, p, g and o and completed lots of additional activities around these sounds. 
 

We have also started our special Write Dance lessons which are a combination of PE (dance and gross motor skills) and fine motor skills. This week, we imagined that we were volcanoes!

Week 4

This week we have been learning about the five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. We have explored our senses in lots of different ways including going on a sound walk, writing in different materials, smelling different scents, playing with lavender playdough, painting with sound, tasting things that were salty, sweet, sour and bitter as well as many more things. 
 

We have also continued with our phonics. This week we have learnt the sounds ‘t’ and ‘i’ and have also started to learn how to read and write some simple CVC words using magnetic letters.

We have been learning Each Peach Pear Plum over the past few weeks. Take a look below!

Week 3

We have been completing the Reception baseline with the children this week and we are incredibly proud of them and how they have all tried their very best.

We have also been learning more about ourselves by looking at our skeletons and exploring the senses, as well as talking about our families. 
 

This week we have started our Read, Write, Inc. phonic sessions and the children have all worked really hard. They have enjoyed completing follow up activities around these sounds in the afternoons too. 

Week 2

We went on a walk around our school grounds and explored the growing area. We found lots of apples growing on the trees and some grapes growing inside the polytunnel too! We decided to make apple cakes with the apples that we had found. We talked about the different ingredients that we needed and how to make the cakes. We took it in turns to mix the different ingredients together before baking them. We took them home as a special treat and the next day, lots of the children said that the cakes were very tasty! Mrs. Winterhalder and Mrs. Owen definitely agreed with the children too!
 

Later on in the week, we spent some time looking at the grapes and apples and practiced our artistic skills by drawing them. 
 

We have been doing lots of storytelling and getting to know our new classmates and teachers. We’ve also talked about our bodies, looking closely at our faces and creating self portraits using a range of different materials. We have begun to talk about different emotions and how our faces show these feelings too. 

Week 1

What a great start we’ve had to the year! We are really proud of how well the children have settled into the new routines of our class. We’ve been busily exploring our new classroom and the different areas to play in. We also got to meet our year 6 buddies. We had so much fun going on a treasure hunt around the school with them to find special items to welcome the Reception children to our school.