This week in Reception we have continued to focus on the story ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’.  We have started to make collages for each of the environments in the story. We used the Bear Hunt story to create music using instruments for each of the environments and discussed which instruments sound most like a snow storm, water,  mud etc. In PSHE, we have been talking about never giving up and relating this to our tortoise ELLI animal we learnt about last term. The children continued to enjoy playing in the bear cave role play areas in the classrooms.

In phonics this week, the children have learnt the digraphs ee and ai and the first trigraph igh. They have learnt the common exception words her and all.  The children have also drawn and labelled a story map of ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’. They had to remember the sequence of the story and represent it. When writing with your child please encourage them to only use capital letters when appropriate, rather than in the middle of words! As a class we have also made story paths and walked along them retelling the story using positional language.

During maths this week, we have been discussing positional language and been introducing 3D shapes. The children have been putting objects and themselves in different positions and using the language above, left, bottom, end, below, right, left, front, in, under, straight, near, down, on, behind, outside and inside. They have also been looking at 3D shapes, naming them and using them to stack and build models. We have sorted the shapes into different groups decided by the children who have also told us their reasoning about why they have grouped them in the way they did e.g. circle faces (cylinder, cone) and no circle faces. We are excited to build 3D models using junk modelling next week. Thank you to all of the parents who have already signed up to help!