It's almost time to see our show.Thank you so much for sending the costumes in today as we are going to be doing a dress rehearsal early next week so we are ready for the big parent performances next Tuesday 11th December and Wednesday 12th December at 9:30 am. We hope that you enjoy it as much as we have we have worked very hard trying to remember all the songs and all the actions and all our words!
As we know the story of baby Jesus, we have been immersing ourselves in other Christmas activities such as making Christmas cards and writing lists for Santa using sparkly gel pens. The Post Office has been very busy wrapping and sending presents and cards. We even decorated the EYFS area and it looks just great. We have even had a visit from one of Santa's elves. He has been appearing around the school looking out for fabulous children and he came to Apple Class and Cherry Class. We were very excited to see him of course!
This week of learning all about weddings ended with our beautiful EYFS wedding between Anna and Tyler. What a marvellous couple they made. We were their guests and we really enjoyed watching them get married (pretending, of course!). Isaac read out the vows as he was the vicar and Jakey took all the photos. He was a very lively photographer and everyone wanted to be in his shots. Ronnie was Tyler's best man and held the special little rings made from tin foil. Lily and Orla dressed up as bridesmaids and sprinkled confetti down the aisle. After the ceremony Anna and Tyler signed the book and cut the cake. Hanna read out poem that we had made up in class about getting married. The special couple had a first dance and then we all joined in the party! What a wonderful time we had. Especially when we got to eat our wedding biscuits that we decorated with icing and hundreds and thousands. We love weddings in Reception and this was one of the best. Weddings are great fun and now we know why.
Our new topic this half term is all about celebrations so what a way to start than with the upcoming festival of Diwali. This festival of lights is celebrated by Hindus around the world so we thought we would also join in. We now know the ways Hindus celebrate Diwali with fireworks, diva candles, decorations and special food. We even tried some Diwali food as Mrs Smith brought some things in for us to taste. We thought it was tasty and spicy. We are also making some diva lamps from clay. We will decorate them next week - how exciting!
Boring stuff:
Please send us your old recycling for our junk modelling box. We love it and we love to make new things from it. We also need any unused envelopes and writing paper or cards that you may have and don't need anymore for our role play Post Office area. If you have any, we will gladly have it. Many thanks!
The final week was full of fun with our circus workshop at the start and ending with a Teddy Bear picnic in the hall with our teddies.
We are certainly looking forward to the half term and a little rest from all the fun we are having at school.
What a fantastic book by Michael Rosen and Illustrated so beautifully by Helen Oxenbury. We certainly think so as we used it for all our learning and the end of the week finale was to go on our very own bear hunt in the EYFS garden. What a brilliant time we had! You can see some of the photos below...
This week the Reception children went along to the Harvest Celebration assembly where Deniol (our vicar) explained what Harvest was all about. It was very interesting how he used the letters from the word HARVEST to make other words that were important and helped us to understand how fortunate we were to have food and we really enjoyed eating out lunch that day and felt very grateful.
The children also performed their Harvest Poem to the rest of the school which was exciting as they have never done anything like this before. They were (it has to be said) marvellous, using their voices clearly as well as performing all the actions. Well done!
This week we looked at the book by Bill Martin and illustrated by Eric Carle. It was very good and we made a list of the animals in the book. In our literacy lessons we drew our own creature and tried our hand at writing what it was now that we are doing daily phonics sessions. In maths we are counting to 5 and then to 10. We are trying to make sure that when we we count, we count each item by touching it so we remember not to count it again. We are also trying to remember that when we get a number of cubes out, even if we move them around and muddle them up, there are still the same number of cubes. We are also practising looking at dots on a dice and saying how many there are without counting them first. Phew! Busy week.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
We say Goodbye to Goldilocks after this week so its a good job we know the story so well! We have retold it, given voices to all the characters and used facial expressions to depict the bears and Goldilocks... we even put some music to it. After much bear painting we now have a fabulous display in the corridor and in Apple Class. We have drawn Goldilocks in our books and tried writing her name. Now we are looking forward to trying Daddy Bear's porridge on Friday. He has a great recipe and always enjoys making porridge for the classes to try. Watch this space for the photos...
This week we have also completed a whole week of phonics and covered the first phase 2 sounds 's' 'a' 't' and 'p'. Please look on the Phonics Play Website for some sound games. You can also watch Mr Thorne's phonic videos on You Tube. In maths we looked at patterns and repeating patterns using shapes and colours. Perhaps you can spot some patterns or make your own?
We also joined in with whole school assemblies as we went along to the Singing Assembly on Monday and we also went to Celebration Assembly last week.
Please do look at the Powerpoint presentation above for information that was given during the EYFS Presentation Evening. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask our lovely staff who will be happy to help you.
Our theme this half term is all about bears. Over the next two weeks we are going to be exploring the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. We have already used the story sack and read a book. All our activities are based around this story so we have a bear cave to role play in and we are painting bears as well as ordering bowls and chairs and lots of other exciting things.
We have also started singing counting songs and practising counting on our fingers and recognising the number of dots on a dice without counting. Tricky! We are learning to listen with Lola the listening leopard. She has some four simple rules that we are trying to practise and perhaps you can have a go at doing them at home as well.
Lola's Listening Rules:
Welcome to your child's first year at school and what an exciting year its going to be!
Its going to be a year of firsts in all manner of ways, we can't wait to get started. The children have already been exploring the different areas of EYFS.
Please look at the Topic Map below for a sneak peek at the things we are going to be learning this term.