Home Learning Friday 13th November

Well that was a short but sweet week for us here in reception – but one we managed to fill to the brim with our super learning nonetheless! We apologise that we have been unable to have our own day to reflect and join in with the fundraising for Children in Need. We hope that you have been able to enjoy some of the activities that we uploaded to the website and would encourage you to talk with your children about the purpose of this day and why we are fundraising.

Our RWI work this week has centred around these three new sounds:

v- Down a wing, up a wing (vulture)

y- Down a horn, up a horn and under his chin (Yak)

w- Down, up, down, up (worm)

We had great fun creating watches, using our sequins and tissue paper to decorate the ‘y’ sound and producing our very own bubbling volcanoes! There has been more work on blending three sounds to make a word this week both during carpet time and in our classroom provision and we would encourage you to continue this at home.  If possible, create sound hunts around the house along with pictures and see if your child can a) connect the sounds with the pictures and b) attempt to use Fred talk to sound out and blend. At this point children may only be hearing the initial sounds in words, some can hear the initial sound and the last sound such as ‘ct’ and some children may be able to blend all of the sounds into one word: ‘cat’. We learnt some new red words too:

he

she

we

me

It would be great if you could recap these over the weekend. 

In our maths work this week we have been focusing on the number 7, the children have been counting with 1;1 correspondence and adding stars using the language of ‘more’ up to seven. We then went on to play the magic number game. Try this at home with your child – draw a number line to 10. Think of a magic number and your child has to guess what number you are thinking of by process of elimination using the language ‘is your number more than 2.. is your number less than 9’ this is a brilliant way to increase place value understanding and the children have loved this game this week.

Following on from this in our maths work, we have been doing lots of maths singing to consolidate our understanding of one less. We all took turns pretending to be bakers and sang the five currant buns in a bakers shop song. We noticed that every time a currant bun was taken away we were left with the number that comes before that number. These are the first steps on the ladder to understanding subtraction.

In our topic work we have been finding out that many people in our community observe Remembrance Day. We watched a lovely video that explains Remembrance Day to children on the Cbeebies website. You may wish to watch this with your child and they can explain to you what is happening in the video. We talked about picture 'symbols' and how the hat in the video represented the soldiers and the Poppies that grew on the battlefield symbolised the soldiers who lost their lives. Whilst it is important to share with our children our heritage, we also worked on critical thinking – asking the children why it is important to remember those who sacrificed in the past? We have produced our own transient art of the poppy fields on the battle grounds in Normandy and later in the week we looked at a white poppy as a symbol of peace.  

We're pleased that lots of people have been able to log on to Bug Club.  Do let me know if you're having issues. 

Many of us had a go at group reading in the classroom too and I've added this onto your child's 360 journal.  If I didn't read with you child this week - they were in Friday's groups so they will be 1st next week!

Have a fantastic three-day weekend! We will see you next week for lots more fun and learning.

Mrs G

Maths fun this week...
Finding out that some people choose to mark Remembrance day
PE fun...
Getting going with reading!