Reception

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.

This week in Reception we welcomed the children back to school after the Easter holiday.

The children have all been really happy to be reunited with their friends and adults and very quickly reacquainted themselves with the environment. In Literacy we have a new story: Mr Gumpy’s Outing by John Burningham. Mr Gumpy links in really well at this time of year, as it is a journey story. Lots of children also went on journeys in the holiday. Elephants and Zebras have been writing sentences to share where they went! The children are in the process of learning the story orally, using their bodies to create actions to match certain words and acting out the story in Explore Time. Mr Gumpy’s Boat (aka Miss Bates’ laundry basket) has been all around the world lots of times already!

https://www.google.com/search?q=mr+gumpys+outing+youtuve&rlz=1C1GCEV_enGB1054GB1054&oq=mr+gumpys+outing+youtuve&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQABgNGIAEMgoIAhAAGIAEGKIEMgoIAxAAGIAEGKIE0gEIMzg2M2owajSoAgCwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:b225b0c6,vid:h23yQOafu4Y,st:0

In Maths we are focusing on the key sentence, ‘When counting we point to each object one at a time and say its number name’. Elephants and Zebras have been doing lots of counting activities to independently put this into practise. We had lots of fun counting each other! Some strategies we have learnt involve moving the children, e.g. asking everyone to stand up and then to sit down as they are counted; moving children from one side of the room to the other as they are counted; and lining the children up and counting along the line.

We decided that lining objects up was a good way to ‘see’ the number.

Here is some of our maths from this week:

Nursery Rhyme of the week:

Five Little Monkeys Swinging From a Tree

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-five-little-monkeys-swinging-from-a-tree/z6x9382

How to help at home:

Count objects one at a time and say its number name. Emphasise what’s being counted using a counting wand, stick or feather. Include errors for your child to spot e.g. saying the number words in the wrong order, forgetting to stop and going around again; and not knowing how many there are ‘altogether’.

Practise sounding, blending and recognising harder to read and spell words by sight.

Draw a journey you have been on as a family, paying attention to the start and finish as well as landmarks seen along the way then colour it in.

Make an animal poster with one of the animals from the story: rabbit, cat, dog,sheep, cow, chicken, goat.

Wow! What another busy week we have had! We have continued our learning about Handa’s Surprise but this week we have innovated our own ideas. We began by changing the main character and fruits in the story. What do you think of our ideas? We tried really hard to use our phonics independently to write the names of the fruit and some of us even had a go at writing describing words too!

We would like to say a big ‘thank you’ to our amazing Friends of Merry Hill for organising a fantastic Easter egg hunt for us. We had great fun taking part in it and loved our delicious treats too! THANK YOU!

During explore time, we had a lot of fun practising our fine motor skills by making Easter baskets. We had to work really carefully to cut around the net template and then glue it together before filling it up to gift to our family.

Our outside role play is currently set up as a garden centre and we are enjoying selling flowers to the adults. This links well to our inside investigation area where we have planted a variety of seeds and are watching them grow and develop into little seedlings before hopefully some delicious herbs!

We are also practising our fine motor skills as we wrap the flowers and carefully tape them closed, as well as learning about money. We have been sharing out the money with our friends and some of the children have even been able to work out the change for the customer!

Song spoons and nursery rhyme of the week:

The song spoons have proved popular this week – we have enjoyed using them to sing some of our favourite rhymes with our friends and have even been putting on shows! The nursery rhyme for this week is One, Two, Buckle my Shoe. We have practised singing the words and also listened carefully to notice the rhyming words. Maybe you could have a go at thinking of your own rhyming words at home.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-one-two-buckle-my-shoe/zkvtqp3

This week we have been revisiting all of the sounds we have learned so far this term and our grown ups are very impressed by how many we have remembered, as well as us using them independently when trying to read unfamiliar words or even in our writing!

The harder to read and spell words we have learned this week are: children, love

How you can help at home:

• Practise the harder to read and spell words daily
• Read every day with your child – maybe visit the library for some new books
• Complete a ‘Wow’ card for your child to share with their friends at school
• Encourage your child to write in a variety of contexts – shopping lists, packing lists for going on holiday, birthday cards, book making, postcards, book marks for friends and family

This week we have started a new story called Handa’s Surprise.

We have started to explore the story further in Child Initiated Learning and have been doing some fantastic writing in our purple books.  We will keep you posted so keep an eye out for more amazing story writing soon! Here we are in explore time trying out the new Handa Surprise masks and persevering to hang them up by ourselves in the storytelling area. When asked ‘how do you feel about the new story?’ some of the children said “in the green zone because we feel happy and excited!” We have been learning the new story, generating new story ideas and writing harder to read and spell words ‘she’, ‘will’ ‘like’, ‘the’ etc.

We have a bowl of fruit from the story which we got to see and discuss- the ripe, red mango, the yellow prickly pineapple, the creamy green avocado etc. (Miss Bates sadly couldn’t get a guava in Sainsburys so one of the girls cleverly made a yellow guava out of lego for the fruit bowl! Great thinking!)

Fiddly Fingers: 

The children have been using our soft start in the mornings between 8:45 and 9am to continue their Fiddly Finger learning which helps develop fine motor skills and supports the children’s writing skills.

Threading and manipulating play doh has really helped to develop and strengthen the muscles in their hands.

The children have been identifying numerals then using play doh to add the correct number of apples into a tree as well as onto a tens frame.

The children have also been learning to problem solve and colour in between the lines when doing a Safari Colour by numbers scene.

The children have been counting pictures from Handa’s Surprise and forming numerals themselves using a secure tripod grip to hold their pencil.

The children have been doing a smashing job of putting their activities away in their folders, filing them independently into their colour groups before sitting to take the register at 9am.

Our new harder to read and spell words learnt in Phonics this week are ‘one’, ‘out’ and ‘little’.

Our Nursery rhyme of the week has been ‘One Tomato, Two Tomatoes’-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-one-tomato-two-tomatoes/zf2kbdm

How You Can Help At Home:

• Daily reading and writing in your child’s orange reading record
• Singing the nursery rhyme of the week
• Encouraging your child to write or draw the story map for the new story at home
• Discuss “doubles” and use different representations of doubles including fingers, toys, items in the kitchen
• Observe changes in the seasons as we transition from Winter to Spring- finally!

Spring has sprung!
Here is our Curiosity Cuboid ready for Easter. The children have enjoyed looking at it and spotting the signs of Easter.

Understanding the World

The children have been helping us to plant some seeds in the investigation area. They will be eagerly observing changes over time.

PE

We have begun our Jungle Gym gymnastic lessons. To begin with, we started moving around the hall like a jungle animal. Here you can see our orangutan and panda moves. Next we put our moves to music. Each time the music stopped we climbed onto some equipment and went to sleep. Next week we will be adding our animal moves to different pieces of gym equipment.

Literacy – Owl Babies

This week we are innovating the story. The children are now much more confident retelling the original story so the next stage is to change elements of it. As a class we talked about where the baby owls thought their mother had gone e.g hunting for food or they were worried that a fox had got her. In talk partners the children discussed their own ideas of where the owl mother had gone. There were some great suggestions such as going to the toy shop to get an owl-teddy, to the cinema to watch a film or that a shark had got her! We really enjoyed innovating ‘Owl Babies’ together. 

Phonics review

We are reviewing all the phonemes we have learned so far and learning some harder to read and spell words.

This week the words we are learning are:

some,

come,

there,

you.

Please challenge your child to use the words in a sentence and identify them in their reading books. Please remind your child that phonics will not help them to read these words. They need to recognise them by sight.

How you can help at home:

Our Nursery Rhyme this week is “One man went to mow.” Join in with it here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-one-man-went-to-mow/zjgnmfr

The Reception Team 

We had some lovely interactions with the baby chicks that hatched in Nursery and this also ties in nicely with our Owl Babies learning in Literacy. We have been excitedly following a live video of the chicks in action during our explore time! We think they are very cute!

This week we have been using different tools to prepare our own snacks. We have used knives to carefully cut into cucumber, watermelon and some of us even tried to cut apples! (Use one-handed tools and equipment, for example, making snips in paper with scissors – Development matters – 2021)

As spring approaches, we have been thinking about the signs we might see when out and about. We spoke about the beginning of plants growing and had a go at painting daffodils using watercolour paints. We have also been  planting sunflower seeds – we are looking forward to seeing how tall they can grow!

World Book Day!

In Reception we read two stories and focused our learning around them for the day. https://www.worldbookday.com/videos/bee-me/ and https://www.worldbookday.com/videos/acorn-wood-colours/.  In the morning, we made menus for a restaurant that cooks food with only one colour and then made the food in the construction area to open a food shop.

We loved receiving photos of you reading in unsual places and had a great day sharing everyone’s favourite books! How fantastic do we we look!

How you can help at home:

Continue to read daily at home

Practise the harder to read and spell words with your child – play games to make this fun

Gardening – discuss changes to the natural world

Get your child involved in helping around the house – cooking, cleaning, washing up

What have we been up to this week?

Owl Babies

Some new friends have come to visit us this week in Reception! They are called Sarah, Percy and Bill! Like us, these owl babies sometimes miss their mummy. This is a book which can help reassure children after a half term break, that they will see Mummy again and supports  resilience during the school day.  We have been sequencing the story into a story mountain using our talk for writing colours- green for the beginning, orange for the middle and red for the ending. We used words like ‘first’, ‘next’ and ‘finally’ to emphasise which part was the beginning, middle and end.

Maths and turn taking

In explore time, we have been using a simple 0-10 number track to play games with a partner. We have been using our subitising skills to roll a dice and move our counter along the number track the correct amount of times according to the dice. We have had quality discussions about how it feels to both win and lose. To help us remember die patterns we have been using play doh to make them in Fiddly Fingers!

Half Term Holiday Snapshots

“Play is a key opportunity for children to think  creatively and flexibly, solve problems and link ideas. Establish the enabling conditions for rich play: space, time, flexible resources, choice.” Development Matters, 2023

One child initiated learning choice has been to share what the children got up to on their half term holiday! We used the small world tuff tray outside to enact some events from the past. We talked about places in the local area of Bushey like King George park, the local library, Bushey station, Asda and Costco! If the children struggled to remember, we used a a snapshot sheet to recall some of the places we went, things we ate and who we were with. It was such fun watching some of the children act out play dates they want to go on in the future too!

Self- care and Food

We have been preparing and cutting food to make healthy choices. We have washed our hands, rinsed the snack and cut it safely using cutlery before eating. We have shared the equipment and posted our snack pictures into the snack box after to show we have had snack. Then if any children are left we know who to remind to eat snack!

Recapping how to use the Worry Monster

Our Reception Worry Monster is always ready to gobble up our worries. We have designed new printed sheets and reminded children to write or draw their worry and zip it up into the monster’s mouth. Once they have done that they don’t need to worry about it anymore. The monster will take care of it. Adults at school check the worry monster regularly and can check in with children when needed. We looked at our new Safeguarding Posters to remember who you can talk to at school if your worry just won’t go away.

Nursery Rhyme of the week– 5 Little Monkeys.

How you can help at home?

Please write in your child’s orange reading record each day when they read at home. Consider ” reading books with stories about characters that follow or break rules, and the effects of their behaviour on others.” (Development Matters, 2023)

“Encourage children to describe problems they encounter, and to suggest ways to solve the problem.” and “Choose books, puppets and dolls that help children explore their ideas about friends and friendship and to talk about feelings, e.g. someone saying ‘You can’t play’.” (Development Matters, 2023)

Looking after Property

We have introduced Apple displays to help children know  which areas they are responsible for in tidy-up time, which so far has been a great success! This is helping the children learn to take care of property and respect our school. We will be rotating the names to ensure it is fair and so the children learn how to take care of everything they have been using.

Phonics

In Nursery our children developed their listening skills through focusing on environmental sounds – e.g. they learnt to make a ‘woosh’ noise for a rocket. They recognised different animal sounds and different sounds that they can make with their voices. They started to recognise musical sounds and sounds that you can make on your body e.g clapping. Also, children started to experience the process of orally blending sounds to make words – e.g. C-A-T makes cat.

This year in Reception, all our children in Elephants and Zebras have been working hard on their single sounds for each letter of the alphabet, learning the letter name and the sound that they make to be able to blend sounds for reading and segment sounds for spelling. We have learnt how to blend and segment these sounds into words, thinking about how many sounds are in the word. Once we did this, it was time for the children to move on to the good stuff- diagraphs (two letters one sound)!!

Have a look at some of the short sentences we have been writing using sounds we have learnt this year.

Dinosaur Name Writing

We have been working on a wonderful DINO display to showcase the children’s hard work in Mindful Monday sessions and in the creative area. Look at our Roarsome art!

Our Nursery Rhyme this week:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-the-hokey-cokey/zrcnmfr

How you can help at home:

Here are a range of fun, active games you can play to help your child learn  Harder to Read and Spell words. Harder to Read and Spell words (HRSW) should be read by sight and cannot always be decoded.

Autumn words we have learnt:

I, the, no, put, of, is, to go, into, pull as, his

Spring words we have learnt:

he, she, buses, we, me, be, push, was, her, my, you, they, all, are, ball, tall, when, what

If you play one of these games, please upload to Tapestry or write a Wow Card so we can share your child’s success and praise them for following the ‘Work hard’ Golden Rule at home! 

Another week, another celebration of all our fantastic learning! Reception have been busy learning all about Chinese New Year. We read some stories about the animals that had a race and enjoyed finding out which animal we are based on the year that we were born. 2024 is the year of the dragon, so we had a go at making our own dragons in the creative area.

We have continued our learning about Andy Goldsworthy, creating some more of our own artwork based on his ideas. We have used a variety of materials, both inside and out.

In phonics this week, we have been revisiting all of our learning for this half term. We are really impressed with all the knowledge the children have picked up this year! They are even trying really hard to apply their learnt sounds within their independent writing – well done, Reception!

Tuesday 6th February was Internet Safety Day. We spoke to the children about being SMART when online and using the internet. The children were quick to try and remember these key messages:

S – stay safe (no sharing personal information)

M – don’t meet up (no meeting up with someone you only know from being online)

A – don’t accept (no messages, pictures or friend requests from strangers)

R – is it reliable? (knowing that some things on the internet are not true)

T – tell! (speak to a grown up when someone or something makes you feel worried or uncomfortable)

Please also explore the website below – there are some pictures and a story about keeping safe online.

How you can help at home:

Explore the website about internet safety: https://www.childnet.com/resources/smartie-the-penguin/

Read with your child every day!

Provide opportunities for writing at home – shopping lists, meal plans, birthday cards, invitations, share recipes together etc

Play some board games to help your child take turns and practise maths in a fun way!

Find out which Chinese animal you and your family are based on the year that you were born.

The children looked splendiferous as they entered school today! We really enjoyed becoming word detectives to find out the meaning of new words as well as celebrating the range of words we knew. Some children celebrated words in their home language, others chose words from their favourite sport and some from books, conversation and films! We had words ranging from anatomy to veracious!

To begin the day we joined the rest of the school in the hall for a parade and a story with Mr Reid.

We loved looking at our friends in their outfits and some children were even brave enough to stand up and share their word and definition.

Then we went back to the classroom to take part in lots of word related Explore Time activities. We learned new words from our friends and had a go at writing our own special words on word clouds and in the Reception Garden.

We made words from construction and by catching floating letters in the water tray.

We used playdough to make texture words and shapes and played games and completed puzzles using letters and words.

We want our children and learning community to be excited about words, to celebrate new words learnt and be curious to find out the meaning of new words heard or read. Learning words is really important; the more words your child knows, the more it will help them at school. By working in partnership, the children here at Merry Hill will become skilled word learners. Here are some exciting ideas to try at home.

How you can help at home:

– Cooking – Cooking together involves co-operation, planning, reading, listening and lots of vocabulary – all skills you need to succeed in school, as well as being great skills for life.

https://www.cookuk.co.uk/children-index

– Get crafty – Crafting and/or constructing with your child provides lots of time for talking. Try and listen more than talk, and comment more than question. This website will give you further ideas, but you can do great things with bricks or by cutting up old cereal packets.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups

– Reading and talking – Reading books to your child is a great way to develop your child’s language. Books expose children to more complex language. For children who are learning to read, hearing stories can make them more enjoyable. For confident readers talk about what you have read together to further develop their understanding.

We are currently reading ‘Happy Hatch Day’ by Rob Biddulph.

– Get your child involved in planning parties or trips – this involves lots of talking, thinking and planning. ‘Who will be coming? What will you need to do? What food will you need? What can you do before? Who needs to do what?’ and maybe even ‘ How can we keep costs down?’

– Play word games – see the attachment within Merry Hill Matters this week

-Singing nursery rhymes. This week’s nursery rhyme is ‘Sleeping Little Bunnies’. Join in here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/something-special-sleeping-bunnies

Phonics

In Phonics this week we have learnt three new phonemes:

The mnemonics are as follows:

ow – go slow in the snow

er- a bitter winter

ure – sure it’s the cure

We have also enjoyed learning about Hedgehog Day (2nd February) and the things we can do to help look after them. During our forest lesson we made some brilliant hedgehog pictures by working in a team to collect sticks and pebbles then laying them on the playground in chalk hedgehog shapes.

Wishing you all a super weekend,

The Reception Team

Mindful Mondays & Expressive Art and Design

The children in Reception are learning to, “Explore, use and refine a variety of artistic effects to express their ideas and feelings,” (Development Matters 2023) We have been finding out about the artist Andy Goldsworthy and finding out what sculptures are. As part of our learning we have used natural materials to make sculptures outside during Explore Time.

Red group worked together to make this beautiful natural spiral.

The children then worked together to draw their own chalk spiral and covered it with natural materials. Some children extended this further by creating sculptures with the construction materials. Can you spot The Eiffel Tower?

In the malleable area we continued to work on spiral sculptures using tweezers to select small objects and place them on the line. We used this activity to help the children “Develop their small motor skills so that they can use a range of tools competently, safely and confidently,” (Development Matters 2023).

Literacy

We have been working very hard on our writing. Dinosaurs names are difficult to say and even trickier to write but that has not deterred us from having a very good go.

Physical Development

Continuing with the dinosaur theme we have started putting our dinosaur dance sequences together. Here we are dancing as a Brachiosaurus sequencing STOMP, SWISH and BIFF and BASH movements. Look at our terrifying faces. We worked very hard to dance silently using only our bodies and actions to convey the movement words.

Maths

This week we have been proving that,  when counting in steps of 1 the sequence of numbers always stays the same. We have been using Numberblocks to help us see the staircase pattern from 1-5, understanding that each block goes up by 1 each time. The children have been enjoying building their own towers of blocks using unifix as well as the larger blocks outside to investigate this further.

They have also described numbers in a feely bag to their friends, which were then matched to the correct number block! We watched a clip from Numberblocks which also showed this. If your child would like to watch the whole episode ‘Off we go”  please click on the link below:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08cr0y7/numberblocks-series-1-off-we-go

Understanding the World

In Forest lessons this week we have taken part in the RSPB Big Bird Watch. We had lots of fun trying to identify the birds on the field. We had to be very quiet so we did not scare them off, then we used the iPads to take photos. We identified robins, magpies and blackbirds.

Phonics

Here are the phonemes we have learned this week:

How you can help at home:

Please continue to read with your child daily.

We have been trying to make sculptures of plants using toys and construction in the environment. Why not have a go with lego, counters and fruit you have at home?

Practise this week’s nursery rhyme ‘Old Macdonald had a Farm’.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/nursery-rhymes-old-macdonald-had-a-farm/zn9vhbk

Also the children have loved learning this song linked with our dinosaur theme:

The Prehistoric Animal Brigade | Dinosaur Song | Toddler Fun Learning – YouTube

(So have we!)

We hope you have a lovely weekend,

The Reception Team