Reception Work
Welcome to school (Settling in)
Our main areas of learning are:
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Communication and Language: Listening and attention, Understanding and Speaking
We will be exploring our indoor and outdoor learning environments and doing a variety of activities, including painting our friends and going on a tour of the whole school.
Our activities will help us to settle in to school and make lots of new friends.
*1 - We are very good friends in Reception, we share and look after each other.
*2 – We did an obstacle course in our playground physical area, this involved being blindfolded so we really had to trust our friend to tell us where to go. We had to be really careful and use good language to guide our friend around the obstacle course.
* 3 – We have worked together in groups a lot, doing many different tasks, such as creating vehicles with the play pod equipment.
I am amazing! (Me, My Feelings, My Family)
Our main areas of learning are:
Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Self-confidence and Self-awareness and Managing feelings and behaviour
Expressive Arts and Design: Exploring and using media and materials
We will be using mirrors to look at ourselves and create self-portraits using paint, pencils and ICT.
We will be exploring our feelings and introduce a feelings chart into our classroom, this will help us to manage our feelings and behaviour more effectively.
*4 – This week we have learnt all about ourselves; including how we might feel sometimes. We are happy most the time, but sometimes we can feel sad. We have learnt to use an emotions chart to help us say how we are feeling. When we are sad, we can use our language and talk to someone. There are lots of people that will help us if we feel sad.
*5 *6 – We have created a lot of self-portraits this week, using twigs and stones, pencils and crayons, paint, and even the iPads.
Season of Plenty (Autumn)
Our main areas of learning are:
Communication and Language: Understanding, and Speaking
Understanding the World: The World
We will be spending lots of time outdoors exploring our environment at this time of year and noticing the changes that are occurring in the weather, the leaves and the animals.
This topic will help us to become more aware of our World and to gain an understanding of the seasons, in particular ‘Autumn’.
*7– We went on an autumn scavenger hunt, where we searched for different coloured leaves, pine cones, conkers and sycamore seeds. When we found them we could tick them off our list. We collected loads!
*8 – During our Autumn topic we learnt about all the changes that occur in Autumn, from the weather and the leaves to the changes that the animals go through. We had lots of fun exploring the leaves, and looking at all the different colours.
*9 - We explored pumpkins, we talked about the colours, smell and texture of the pumpkin.
Head to Toe (Our body / Our Senses)
Our main areas of learning are:
Physical Development: Health and Self-care
Understanding the World: People and Communities
This topic enables children to gain a greater understanding of how their bodies work and how we should look after our bodies to keep us healthy.
We will be focusing on our heart, lungs, stomach and brain and will learn about our organs through different activities including physical exercise.
We will be learning about our five senses through activities such as smell hunts and taste tests.
*10 – During our Head-to-Toe topic, we did a lot of physical exercise to feel our lungs and our heart working. We started breathing faster, and we could feel our heart beating faster too.
*11 – We created some fantastic skeletons out of cotton buds, we learnt that our bones that form our skeleton are there to protect all of our organs.
*12 – Our role play area was transformed into a doctor’s surgery and we had lots of fun writing out prescriptions and bandaging up our friends (pretend) broken bones!
The following week we learnt all about our senses;
*13 – We felt lots of different textures, some were soft and slimy and some were hard and spiky.
*14 – We went on a smell hunt and found some horrible smells and some lovely smells.
*15 – Our favourite sense day was the taste sense. We got to try some yummy foods like chocolate, and some foods that many of us didn’t like – like lemon and marmite!
What’s on the Menu?
Our main areas of learning are:
Physical Development: Health and Self-care
Understanding the World: The World
Expressive Arts and Design: Exploring and using media and materials
This topic enables children to gain a greater understanding of the world.
We will be learning about our topic through activities including baking and eating healthy food, an ‘egg’speriment and making an egg box chicken.
*16 – Healthy eating is very important and we stuck down all the foods that we should be eating onto our healthy eating plate, we know that we should only have ‘just a little bit’ of fats and sugars.
*17 – Our role play area was transformed into a farm shop and we have enjoyed writing shopping lists and measuring vegetables and weighing vegetables. We had a farm shop outside too.
*18 – We used iPads to draw pictures of our favourite healthy snack, and wrote a short sentence about it.
*19 – For our final section of our what’s on the menu topic, we looked at shops and packaging for foods. We did an ‘Eggsperiment’ where we packaged our own eggs, and then dropped them from a height to see which packaging was the best, and which eggs did not crack! The bubble wrap was the best packaging!
*20 – We designed and created bags. Some were strong enough to hold a tin of beans.
Winter Wonderland
Our main areas of learning are:
Understanding the World: The World
Expressive Arts and Design: Exploring and using media and materials and Being Imaginative
Communication and Language
We will be learning about our topic through a variety of activities including role playing in our winter wonderland area and experimenting with ice; finding the quickest way to rescue toys from ice blocks and, in contrast, trying to stop ice blocks from melting.
*21 – We did some experiments with ice. We tried to break the ice and save the toys inside as quickly as we could. Melting the ice took too long so some of us tried to smash the ice by stamping on it, and some of use tried to break the ice with sticks.
*22 – For another experiment we tried to melt the ice; some of us tried blowing on it, others used toothbrushes to rub it, and others thought it would be quicker to put it in our pocket and hold it in our nice warm gloves and rub it so it got hot.
*23 – We have really enjoyed learning about and exploring the snow (we were very lucky that it snowed during this topic).
