Reception

To the Elephants and Zebras of 2024,

We have loved every minute of watching you grow this year. We are so proud of all you have achieved. You are now so fast at getting changed for PE. We cannot catch you out in phonics recap anymore – “There you are!” You have tried so many new foods at lunch times. You zip up your coats on your own. You look out for your class mates and you are brave to ask for help when you need it. It is time for you all to move onto Year 1 and continue to grow. Remember us and say hello when we see you around school next year and keep up all the hard work you have done this year.

From all the grown ups in Reception.

It has been a wonderful year in Reception. We have been so busy, learned such a lot and had lots of fun and laughter along the way. Here are a few of the highlights:

Forest lessons:

Christmas Show:

Celebrating World Hedgehog Day:

Dancing like a dinosaur and inventing our own dinosaurs:

Easter hunt in the classroom:

World Book Day wearing our PJs:

Capturing signs of Spring:

Trip to Tring Museum:

Sports Day:

And here we are – so independent and ready for Year 1.

To all the parents of Elephant and Zebra Class, thank you for your continued support this year. Thank you for hearing your child read, for learning their phonemes and harder to read and spell words, for sharing “wow” moments with us and for taking Zippy and Edgar on exciting journeys.

An extra thank you to those of you who volunteered as Surprise Readers or came on school trips. Those special moments are the ones your child will always remember.

Have a wonderful Summer and we look forward to seeing you all again in September,

The Reception Team

Monday 1st July was Canada Day. We were very lucky to have a special visitor in Reception who is from Canada and who shared a story that included Canadian facts. We also learned that a Beaver and a Racoon are animals from Canada.

We also wished Miss Adams a very Happy Canada Day as well.

Transition

These last few weeks of the Summer Term have been an absolute pleasure with our Zebras and Elephants. They have grown in independence over the year, know the school’s high expectations for consistently good behaviour and have formed strong and lasting friendships with their peers.

We can also see they are beginning to outgrow the Early Years and to help them to prepare for their journey to Year 1 we have gone on some transition walks this week.

We spotted things that will stay the same, like the Hall.  We spotted things that will be different, like the door we come in through.

We searched for where we will hang our coats and PE kits. We checked where the toilets are and finally where our classrooms will be.

We are very excited about the upcoming changes but some of us are a little nervous too so we spent some time talking about this in our Jigsaw sessions and sharing that it is OK to be worried, excited, nervous and anxious about change and that we all feel that way about things that are new.

Phonics

This week is assessment week. We have gone back through all the phonemes we have learned so far to see which ones we have remembered and which still need to be practised.

A split digraph is two vowels that make one sound but are split by one or more consonants for example:<a-e> as in ‘make’ or <i-e> as in ‘inside’. There are six split digraphs in the English Language. <a-e> <i-e> <u-e> <o-e> <y-e> (as in ‘type’).

Please do recap the spilt digraph sounds where you can. So far we have learned <e-e> “the athletes compete,” and <a-e> “cake by the lake“.

How you can help at home:

Talk positively to your child about the upcoming changes with them moving into Year 1. Ask them about things that will stay the same. Please do share any questions they may have with us on Tapestry. Thank you.

Mindfulness Monday

This week in our Mindfulness Monday session we used the boat designs the children created last week and they referred back to them to make a boat independently. The children found the materials needed from the creative cupboard and the junk modelling station. They knew what to collect because they had already labelled their work with careful writing.  Well done!

It was also an option to take our boats outside to test them. We were very happy when the boats  floated on the surface of the water tray.

Phonics

This week we have been introduced to new sounds in Phonics:  au, ey, a-e and e-e.

The mnemonics are ‘pause the launch’, ‘pay for honey with money’, ‘cake by the lake’ and ‘compete like an athlete’ to remember the sounds.

Nursery Rhyme of the week:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-the-big-ship-sails-on-the-ally-ally-oh/zkpp7nb

Things you can do to help:

Continue to support your child with daily reading and writing in their orange reading record.

Explore halving and doubling in the kitchen by cooking together and measuring.

When booking summer holidays, discuss the people, communities and culture of the area you are visiting with your child to enrich their understanding and excite them for the summer holiday!

On Friday we were very excited as Reception’s first Sports Day had arrived! We had all been practicing hard and were now ready for the event, The Merry Hill Olympics! We came into school wearing our PE kit and trainers for a fun filled morning.

First we got into our teams and headed up to the field, then we took part in the different activities. There was an egg and spoon race, penalty shoot out, dressing up, target throwing and even a water race! They were all great fun.

After that we did our running races. We were so fast and great at congratulating our friends!

We then had a wonderful time at the picnic on the school field.

Our teachers were very impressed that we were able to concentrate and complete our activities so well, even though we were being watched by so many grown ups!

We had a really super sports day!

Literacy

We have been continuing our learning on pirates by learning about time connectives. Here are the actions we use when we retell a story using time words.

We followed written instructions to make a pirate hat and a treasure map. We connected jumbled up time words to the written time connectives to help us learn whether they need to be used in the beginning, middle or the end. There was a challenge in the treasure box to put the instruction photos in the correct order without the words. The children will be building on this to write their own instructions soon.

Our Trip to Tring Museum

Our trip to Tring Museum on Thursday the 6th of June was a huge success! First we lined up with our partners and our key adults and boarded the coach. We were so grown up and sensible walking down the pavement. We put on our seatbelts and went on our way! We played ISpy and looked at the scenery.

After that, it was time for our Minibeast Workshop. We observed pond creatures in pond water and wrote down our findings then went to the meadow to catch more wild minibeasts with nets. We were ever so lucky to find and capture a dragonfly, bumblebee, caterpillar, snail and beetle. We even spotted a rare wild orchid growing in the meadow, which is not very common and a special experience to share.

Next we went inside to visit galleries 1 and 3. We were able to stroke the fur of a real red fox and squirrel monkey.

Finally we visited galleries 4 and 5. The Zebra room was fascinating, we all gathered to look closely at the Zebras features and find out about Walter Rothschild who owned the museum and used to ride a carriage pulled by Zebras through the streets of Tring. When we found the W for walrus we challenged ourselves to spell walrus with our bodies!

Lastly we went back on the coach and had a safe journey home. By this time some of us were exhausted and had a few zzzzzzzz’s.

Thank you to all our parent helpers!

Welcome back everyone after a wonderful May half term! We started the week settling in doing a lovely Draw with Rob step-by-step video on the carpet. The ship was a little clue for what we are going to be doing in our Summer Fun topic: pirates!!

We have been looking at the Cutty Sark and the Golden Hinde ships on Google Maps Streetview and seeing what sort of features a Pirate ship has. We have been extending this and independently labelling pirate ships in Literacy. Some of us even came up with Pirate names for ourselves and tricked their adults by writing their new pirate name on their sheets instead of their real names! In explore time we extended this by drawing and writing pirate treasure maps.  One of the best parts about Literacy this week was playing Pin the Eye Patch on the Pirate instead of Pin the Tail on the Donkey!

In Maths, the children have been recapping how to subitise numbers represented by finger patterns and orientate a rekenrek correctly then pushing a number of beads with one finger. Our key sentence this week is ‘Subitise means say how many you can see without counting’. Our activity in our purple books is an Elmer the Elephant colour by numbers where the children have been subitising, matching to a numeral and reading the colour’s name correctly to get the right colour pencil.

We have been using a variety of representations in Maths, as well as using the new Rekenreks we are also using numicon, dice, whiteboards and whiteboard pens. First we rolled a dice, subitised the number and then found the corresponding numicon piece in partners. The children were absolutely fantastic at doing this independently and sensibly  taking turns on the carpet. Outside maths was a scavenger hunt, looking at photos of fingers being held up and matching to the correct numicon outside, too.

Outside in Explore time, we have been playing dress up and reading books featuring pirates such as Peter Pan. We have been making pirate ships out of the construction materials and ensuring that we have the correct parts like the anchor, mast, hull and even a plank for the teachers to walk the plank!

Nursery Rhyme of the week:

I’m a Pirate:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-im-a-pirate/zmmkbdm

How to help at home:

Support your child to subitise past the number 5 and identify larger numbers by seeing “5 and a bit”. i.e. When my eyes see 6 they see 5 and 1 more, when my eyes look at 7 they see 5 and 2 more

Go on  a nature walk and observe signs of spring turning into summer. Discuss what you notice as well as what’s the same and what’s different.

What busy little bees we have been in Reception this week! We started the week off by celebrating World Bee Day. We learned some interesting facts about bees – even some of the grown ups learned new things too! Then we set off to create some painted bees. We had to use our fine motor skills and patience to carefully create these bee-utiful slate bumblebees! We considered the colours and patterns that are found on many bees. Did you know – some bees can be red and black in colour?!

Some of us continued our learning about bees outside and made our very own hives that we decorated with honeycomb shapes – we learned that this shape is called a hexagon because it has six sides! We also wanted to take care of the bees in our environment and creatively used the ‘Bee Cafe’ to make some tea for the bees. We added grass and flowers to the teapot before mixing and pouring it out carefully which meant we were practising our fine motor skills even more!

During Literacy this week, we have had a lot of fun making our own books linked to the text we have been learning – Stuck in the Mud by Pie Corbett. We had so much fun when we made our Mr Gumpy books that we decided to use these skills to make improvements to our work this time round! What do you think of our writing? We tried really hard to form all of our letters correctly, use finger spaces and remember a full stop. Ask us to teach you the song we sing to help us check our work – it is very catchy!

In Maths this week, we have been doing a round up of all the learning we have done so far in Reception. We have done really well at remembering our learning from our two and a half terms in Reception and our grown ups are very proud of us. We have been continuing repeating patterns, finding missing numbers that have fallen off of a number track, discussing groups of objects that show ‘more’ or ‘fewer’ and even been making comparisons between objects that are taller, shorter or longer. We had a lot of fun hunting around the classroom for things that were taller than us and smaller than a glue stick – ask us what we found!

Phonics this week has been a recap of all of the sounds we have learned over the last term. We have been using this brilliant knowledge to help us with our independent writing. To help us get even better with our reading and writing, we have had an extra fun challenge this week – we have been hunting all around the classroom for harder to read and spell words. Some of us even wrote out some extra words for our friends to find! We enjoyed this so much that we asked the grown ups to make more for us too.

With the weather changing this week, we have been talking lots about staying safe in the sun and lots of us had a go at making our own sunglasses. We had to use very careful cutting skills to create the space for the lenses and then used coloured cellophane to make the lenses. We had a lot of fun making these and enjoyed trying them out around the classroom. Some of us also enjoyed a sorting activity and were able to discuss other ways to keep us safe in the sun. “Sun cream stops our skin from burning and you have to drink lots of water”

This week’s nursery rhyme has been Ten Fat Sausages

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/articles/z6vh7nb

How you can help at home:

• Practise the harder to read and spell words with your child – play as many games as possible as this is a really great way to help the learning stick
• Look for ways to learn about measures and make comparisons with things around your home – who has the most chips left on their plate? How much more milk do we need for our porridge? I notice that the door is taller than us. Challenge your child to find something taller or shorter than a given object.
• Talk about road safety and practise safely crossing the road when out and about
• Discuss ways to stay safe in the sun
• HAVE A FUN HALF TERM!

Fiddly Fingers

In Fiddly Fingers we “offer children activities to develop and further refine their small motor skills” (Development Matters, 2023) such as “threading and sewing, playing with small world toys, and making models with junk materials, construction kits and malleable materials like clay.” We have also practised number formation and drawing following steps in the correct number order.

Literacy

This week the children are innovating our Stuck in the Mud story from last week. Some of the ideas we came up with were ‘Stuck in the Ice’, ‘Stuck in the Puddle’, ‘Stuck in the Quicksand’, ‘Stuck in the Soil’. In Elephants, we voted altogether and ‘Stuck in the Snow’ was the winner! We then changed the animals in the story to animals which “make sense for the cold” such as arctic foxes and reindeer. We drew the speech bubbles and new characters on our whiteboards. We have been writing our harder to read and spell words on paper and playing games in Explore time.

Phonics

We are working on applying our known sounds to our writing this week. We are writing words and  sentences more and more independently. We can discuss capital letters, finger spaces and full stops as we begin to get ready for Year 1. We are starting to apply them in our Explore time when creating and book-making.

Maths

We have been focusing on our Number bonds to 10 and using a number track. We have been following the Golden Rules and working collaboratively in partners and teams to use our number tracks. We are rolling dice and jumping ahead correctly. We can show this using two different coloured pencils on a tens frame.

Road Safety Week

This week we met a very special Super Cat friend with amazing senses of sight and hearing. He taught us to STOP, LOOK, LISTEN AND THINK when we cross the road. We have been using this learning outside in our Explore time. We drew Zebra crossings, pelican crossings and traffic lights and discussed the importance of waiting for the green man to cross safely. We are being active in the sun and “Encouraging children to be highly active and get out of breath several times every day.” (Development Matters, 2023), especially by using a variety of bikes and trikes. They allow “children to balance, sit or ride on, or pull and push. Two-wheeled balance bikes and pedal bikes without stabilisers, skateboards, wheelbarrows, prams and carts are all good options.” (Development Matters, 2023)

Nursery Rhyme of the week:

10 Green Bottles

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/articles/zncyt39

How you can help at home (when you try these challenges or do an activity you’d like to share, please add a photo to tapestry so we can celebrate the learning taking place at home):

Use chalk outside and draw a number track on the ground from 0-20. Extend by counting verbally 0-30. This will expose children to ‘teen’ numbers 10-20.  Keep looking at numbers 0-20 so children “become familiar with two-digit numbers and can start to spot patterns within them.” (Development Matters) Play hop scotch with numbers 0-20- how big can you make your hop scotch? Use the pavement outside!

Play hide and seek and count to 20/ 30 while waiting for the other person to hide. Start with 20 then extend to 30 if successful.

Ask your child to write a sentence of 5 words and send the message to someone else in your family. Encourage them to use finger spaces in between each word so it can be read, both by your child and by others. Once they have done this they might like to send a message in a bottle.

Literacy

This week we have started to learn a new story called ‘Stuck in the Mud’, where poor Daisy the cow is stuck and Farmer Tom is asking the other farm animals for help to pull her out!  This is not from a book but a Talk for Writing original, written by Pie Corbett. The children soon began to join in using story language and the associated actions. One of the Literacy activities this week was correctly sequencing the order the  animals helped  in the story. 

Here we are using a tuff tray of the characters in the story to sequence the order. Then we had a go at a shared writing activity and the children became very carried away. They collected chairs and resources to make an outdoor classroom and practised their sentence writing. Finally they made the story come alive by acting it out. The children enjoyed this so much they continued by taking on the role of teachers and pupils for a considerable amount of time.

Maths– Composition of numbers 6-10

Our key sentence this week has been ‘If you rearrange the objects in a group, the total stays the same’. The children have been exploring the composition of numbers 6-10 using the ‘5 and a bit’ structure. We have been practising using our hands and  ‘finger representations’. The children have also been using tens frames and double dice frames to visualise what these numbers look like.

The children have enjoyed various activities to help them develop this knowledge; making 10 with double sided counters on a tens frame then recording, making Numicon sandwiches- working out which two numbers go together to make 10, playing ‘grab 10’ seeing if they can grab 10 sorting toys and if they don’t have enough, how many more do they need? Lastly playing ‘guess my number’ on tens frames outside with large spots.

Sun Safety Week

This week is Sun Safety Week and we have been talking about how we stay safe in the sun. Some children have brought in sun hats and all children knew about the importance of wearing sun cream in the sun. Here the children are making their own sun safety posters.

We have also been getting back to nature in our forest lesson. We have been hugging a tree and making pictures using the natural items we found on the forest floor.

How you can help at home:

Please practise our Nursery Rhyme which links in well to our Maths this week:
 There were ten in a bed (add link). https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-ten-in-the-bed/z7bnmfr

Do talk about number pairs that go together to make 10.

Also please continue with daily reading and practise of sounds/HRSW- we are seeing some great progress!

Many thanks. Wishing you all a very happy weekend ahead,

The Reception Team. 

Literacy

This week Zebras and Elephants have been inventing their own stories based on ‘Mr Gumpy’s Outing’ by John Burningham. We have learned how to design a front cover that is colourful and attractive to readers. We also know that an author is a person that “writes the book” and the illustrator is a person that “draws the pictures”.  We have been developing our learning further during child initiated learning time and have done some independent writing all about Mr Gumpy  in the small world area.  Look at our fantastic tripod grip and FINGERSPACES! Some of us also enjoyed working as a team!

Maths

This week our learning in maths has been all about exploring and finding different ways to show number bonds for numbers within 10. We have been singing ‘5 Little kittens jumping on the bed’ as part of our learning. Ask your child to demonstrate how singing songs can really help to embed their learning!

Fiddly fingers

More fun learning and collaboration linked to our literacy work!

Child initiated learning time

With the nicer weather approaching, we have had more fantastic learning opportunities outside. We have seen so much collaboration and independence this week from all of the children in Reception! We are excited to have the potions area back up and running so that we can make all our imaginative creations, whilst practising our fine motor skills using different tools.

Many of the children have been demonstrating their ability to follow our golden rules by looking after property and being helpful. They have been busy spring cleaning our outside garden area, using paintbrushes to ‘wash’ the windows and dirty equipment. They were busy for a long time doing this, working so hard together to make our environment look tidy again!

Following on from our learning about St George’s Day last week, some children have been using their creativity to design and make a family crest or shield. We talked lots about what and how we wanted to represent our family, thinking carefully about the colours and material choices we made. A few children even took on the challenge of making a handle to hold their shield – they showed great determination when exploring which materials worked best!

Phonics

This has been another week to review all the learning we have done so far this year. We are practising the phonemes we have learned by applying them independently to our reading and writing. We are having a big focus on keeping our letters on the line, using finger spaces and trying hard to keep our writing a similar size. Look out for some fantastic examples of this over the next few weeks!

How you can help at home:

• Reading and playing games with your child
• Practical everyday maths – shopping, cooking etc
• Helping to prepare your child for transition and encourage more independence by getting changed by themselves, cutting up their own food, looking after their belongings
• Ensure you regularly go through the harder to read and spell words

SUMMER FUN

Here is our Curiosity Cuboid:

We are thinking about pollution in the sea and the effect of it on sea animals. The children have been looking at the cuboid and comparing the items inside considering which things should be in the sea and which should not.

Literacy

In Literacy we have continued to learn the story of Mr Gumpy. We have worked  with our friends to sequence the map of the story and to draw and label the characters.

Physical Development

We have been making the most of the warmer weather in The Reception Garden. Here we are practising our gross motor skills on the play equipment and our pattern formation in the malleable area.

Maths

This week we are learning to continue to develop our subitising skills in increasingly complex arrangements. Some arrangements are easier to subitise than others eg. A set of six dots arranged in a structured dice pattern that exposes the double-3 pattern is easier to recognise than a random arrangement of 6 dots.

Here we are outside completing tens frames to show different ways we can represent 6.

Library

We are continuing to enjoy our weekly trips to our lovely library. Here we are selecting our books to take home and chatting about ones we have borrowed before with our friends.

How you can help at home

Please continue to practise the harder to read and spell words below. Remind your child that phonics will not help with these words. They must recognise them by sight. Practise by placing them up the stairs and your child has to read the word before they can move up a step.

my

by

she

come

See if you can spot them in reading books as you read at home.

April is the Month of the Military Child and each year we love taking the time to celebrate our military children here at Merry Hill. Service children can face challenges with parents in the armed forces. Yet these children are also an amazing asset to families, schools and the local community. The Month of the Military Child helps us remember this and helps us celebrate their achievements.

Did you know the official flower of the military child is the dandelion because its seeds are blown far and wide by the wind but it will always plant roots and blossom wherever it lands?

The children celebrate ‘Purple Up Day’ every April; purple is a colour used to represent all military services and shows unity with each other. This day is to celebrate the wonderful contributions our military children make to our community, bringing experiences from around the world. We celebrate our military children and thank them for their service.

Purple Up Day at Merry Hill this year is on Friday 26th April –  Please can all children come to school wearing a purple accessory on this day such as a hair ribbon, socks, cardigan or t-shirt.