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!
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
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.