This week in Reception, the children have continued to enjoy the bear hunt topic. They felt and observed ice which represented the snow storm in the story. We predicted and looked at what happened to the ice over the whole day. The children then wrote some beautiful, descriptive ice poems. The topic bear hunt topic will finish at the end of this term so we would like to celebrate by asking the children to bring in one teddy bear next week. This does need to be a bear, rather than another soft toy. Please make sure the bear is named either on a label or with a tag round its neck. We will be doing a lot of exciting work with the bears, including writing a description of them, making observational drawings of them and finishing on Friday with a teddy bears picnic (with honey sandwiches and crisps)! This means, your child will need to be happy to leave the bear in school for the week, so please don’t let them bring in their best teddy bear. The children have loved threading icicles with the parent helpers this week. Thank you to the parents that supported the children this week. 

In maths this week, we have been learning about subtraction. The children have been taking away single digit numbers and representing this in many different ways, including using graphics, tens frames, number tracks and number sentences.

We have started ‘Plan, Do, Review’ sessions where the children plan what they are going to do and tell the class. They then do the activity and review it. They talk about how it went and if they had to make any changes to their plans to overcome any issues they faced. We talk to the children about our ELLI animals with the children; the owl who makes plans and the chameleon who changes his plans when needed.

Our topic for Term 4 will be ‘Africa’ with the supporting texts ‘Handa’s Surprise’ and ‘Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain’.

Please can we also politely remind you to make an observation of your child recognising 3D shapes in the environment. You will not need to log in to 2Simple for this. Any parent that is registered to receive the 2Build a Profile emails can send an email to inbox@2buildaprofile.com directly with the observation. The observation will automatically be allocated to the correct child. (In the case where more than one learner is associated with an email, the email should contain the name of the child in the subject).