This week in Reception

Last week Zebras had their first visit to Bushey Library! We are so lucky to have the library right on our doorstep and we loved walking there with our friends. Some of us have been to a public library before, but for some of us, it was our very first experience.

‘Understanding the world involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community. The frequency and range of children’s personal experiences increases their knowledge and sense of the world around them – from visiting parks, libraries and museums to meeting important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters’ Development Matters 2021

At the library, we learnt lots of important skills: we now know how to ‘borrow’ and ‘return’ our own books, we spoke about fiction and non-fiction books, and we know where we can find different books. We were also lucky enough to have a story time session too!

Did you know we can borrow up to 30 books at a time – wow! Look at the fun we’ve had:

Elephants can’t wait to go next week!

We have had a wonderful time getting ready for the Christmas season in Reception this week.

In Literacy we have been learning the words for our production and adding actions. We have also been in fine voice, singing some seasonal songs that we know and learning the words and tunes to new ones, alongside practising our dance moves. We are so excited to be sharing this production with you at the end of term!

Here is the link to Little Donkey if you would like to help us practise at home.

https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=dVQPmtjHzh4

In Maths we have been counting groups of objects and matching them to number representations (written numerals, dot patterns and fingers!). We have been counting to 20 and beyond when lining up for our daily mile/when returning from the playground at lunch. Since the beginning of the new month we have been focusing on the date and the number day we are on, representing this with straws in a cup, alongside our days of the week and weather chart.

In Phonics we have been reviewing all of the sounds we have learnt this half term and working hard to apply these in both our reading and writing.

Over the last four weeks on Mindful Mondays the children have been very creative making decorations; painting and decorating pine cones, making a woven bauble, a candy cane by threading beads on a pipe cleaner and decorating and cutting a spiral Christmas trees from card. The process involved in making these decorations helps to develop the children’s fine motor skills.