Blog week ending 11th December

Our Christmas performance!
Christmas story telling, re-telling and fun!
Our trip to the post office!

Ho ho ho away for the weekend we go!

Another great week in reception. We hope that you enjoy our Christmas videos that we have uploaded for you - as they have missed out on our Nativity this year, the children loved dressing up and singing in their own mini Nativities!

We have been very busy Fred talking in RWI this week and assessing where the children are at in their sound knowledge, so that we can group them for next term. I will be sending sound sheets home next week for those children who are still not retaining all of set one sounds so that they may be used as daily flashcards over the holidays. I would again remind you to continue to access the 'resources to support your children at home' folder to practise red words, green words and formation. It is wonderful to see this blending and red word knowledge coming through in the children’s reading this week with many children being moved up to stage one + if they are able to blend.  For those children not quite there yet we will continue working on learning the characters and comprehension. Please continue to enjoy Bug Club over the holidays and I will be addressing any continual issues on Thursday during parent consultations.

Over the holidays I would ask for a big push from you at home to improve the children’s fine motor strength. We still have several children using pencil grips to write in Pear class and many children who are still not holding their pencils with the tripod grip or using their scissors accurately. Some ideas that could also be presented from Santa as presents in stockings could be play dough, lots of different colouring materials to encourage mark making and tweezers or magnets to encourage the pincer grip. I have also set Pear class the challenge of learning to zip up their own coat and if they can do that, work on looping their own buttons! January stickers are awaiting!

Our maths work this week has been a final push to correct any misunderstandings with more and less using number lines to help children visually see how they have to jump backwards on the number line for less. There are some number lines included in the 'resources to support your children at home' folder for you to print at home and start using with practical maths play. We have enjoyed decorating Christmas trees adding more or less decorations than a given number and for the children who have grasped the concept of more/less, predicting, explaining and counting how many more/less is needed to form the given number.

Our topic work this week has centred around the story of The Nativity. We have worked on our re-telling skills and sequenced this story using pictures. Ask your child to re-tell you the story in the correct order, encouraging them to use the words first and next.  We enjoyed singing the songs that re-tell the story such as ‘Starry night’ and ‘Away in a manger’, as well as playing in our own nativity tuff try and creating our own Christmas scenes.

The time also finally came this week for our big trip to the post office! We had a lovely walk complete with jingle all the way and although we were unable to enter the post office or have the children physically post their own letters, we all had a fabulous time and the children felt very grown up! We look forward to the replies you will have delivered to your home address from Santa!

Preparations have been well underway this week with Calendars, Christmas cards and decorations although I will leave these as a surprise for you all next week!

This will be our last Reception blog this year although please do check back on next week for some pictures of us enjoying Christmas dinner and the Christmas party. We would like to thank you all for your ongoing support this term. It means a great deal and has made our job so much easier in these difficult times.  I look forward to speaking to you all next week and letting you know how wonderful your children are doing!

A couple of reminders for next week:

Christmas dinner and party day Wednesday - party clothes!

Christmas jumper day with a donation for Save the Children - wear your jazziest jumper!

In the meantime, we look forward to a week of Pantomime, parties and celebration!

Have a great weekend,

Mrs H-S.