24.3.23
We are very nearly at the end of our second term in Reception, it is scary to think there is only one term left!
We have been busy as usual this week, continuing our comparison work looking at Kenya. We have been learning all about a tribe in Kenya called the Maasai. We have learnt how these people spend their life living off-grid without technology and the usual things we have in our lives like supermarkets, cinemas etc. We learnt that like the story Mama Panya's Pancakes, these tribal people live in villages in Manyatta huts. We were shocked to find out that they build their own homes using mud, sticks, grass and cow dung! Life for a Maasai child seems to be much harder than for us as they have lots of jobs to do to help look after their village, as well as going to school like us. We compared their lives with our own, starting with where we live, who we live with and our experiences of school life. Their schools looked very basic, many without furniture, buildings without roofs and the children didn't seem to have toys at school.
We then looked at the capital city of Nairobi. In comparison with the Maasai tribes, their live's were much more similar to ours. Nairobi is much bigger than Alnwick and the buildings are huge- some of us compared this to our capital city, London as some children have had the experience of going there. We could see that the school children in Nairobi had schools similar to ours, they also wear school uniforms and the adults do similar jobs to the adults here in Alnwick; teachers, police, firefighters etc. It was clear looking at photographs that technology was not used as much here, particularly in schools. Whilst we have large computer screens to help teach us, in Kenya the schools lacked this technology. We wrote a class letter that we will be sending to a school in Kenya, we composed some questions that we would love to find out the answer to. Many of us were very interested to know what it is like to live in a hot country and did the children in Kenya like it being hot!
We enjoyed sharing in some of the culture of the Maasai, in particular their famous dance called the Adamu where the tribe use their bodies to jump and their voices to make music. We enjoyed using some instruments to make the sound pattern we could hear in these tribal performances. We also became designers and planned, designed and created our own tribal outfits. We learnt that the Maasai dress in wonderful bright colours and patterns and so we created our own tribal outfits, threaded beads to create their tribal jewellery adornments and constructed with our large loose parts some of the Maasai villages.
In our maths learning we revisited time and thought about the sequencing of time by looking back on our classroom learning book at all of our wonderful memories in Plum Class. We were able to use the vocabulary 'yesterday, before, a long time ago, tomorrow, first, then, next' as we talked about past memories, things we are looking forward to in the future and as we talked about our own daily routines. In Plum Class we are continually sequencing; we start the morning with our daily calendar, identifying the day of the week, thinking about what day it was yesterday and what day comes next. We are beginning to know the months of the year also and have a good grasp of the past from our classroom timeline, we know that the past equals anything that has already happened and that tomorrow, next, in the future, is yet to come.
In our RE session this week we learnt how Christians celebrate Easter Sunday at church and why Easer Sunday is so special for so many. We also found out that Easter eggs are a symbol of Jesus’ new life. The children have been creating some brilliant Easter cards which we hope you will love.
Our ‘Charanga’ session this week started with us listening to Frogs’ Legs And Dragons’ Teeth by Bellowhead. We are beginning to recognise the sounds of some instruments that we hear in songs and pieces of music and we can name quite a few now! We perfected our playing on the glockenspiels to ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and also had a go at playing the key notes in ‘The Hokey Cokey’. As well as this we sang Old Macdonald, Incy Wincy Spider, Baa Baa Black Sheep and Row, Row, Row Your Boat.
Don't forget it's our colour tiddly triathlon on Monday. Please come in bright colourful activewear that you are prepared to get messy! We will be raising money for our EYFS outdoor areas.
Have a lovely weekend,- Miss Freeman