It has been another busy week in Reception. The children have now settled well into their two classes (Otters and Robins) but are also enjoying being able to mix freely during their Independent Learning sessions in the morning and afternoon.

This week, the children continued to learn their Phase 2 phonemes (sounds) in their phonics lessons. This week’s sounds were g, o, c and k. As well as learning the sounds, children are able to practise writing them using the memorable mantras (copies of which can be found here Little Wandle for parents).

In Literacy, we began our Drawing Club sessions this week. Each week, we pick a new stimulus which could be a picture book, a traditional tale or an animation. The children learn new vocabulary associated with the text and then are challenged to draw a character, a setting or an imagined scenario related to the book. This week, we looked at the beautiful tale of friendship ‘Five Bears’ by Catherine Rayner. The children had to draw their favourite bear and then, in their second session, use their imagination to think where the bears might go together.

In maths, we looked at comparing. We looked at lots of different sets and objects to practise comparing amounts and finding out which set had more, and which had fewer. We also looked at how we can compare different objects by seeing what is the same and what is different.

In other lessons, to help the children further familiarise themselves with the school, we looked at an aerial map of the school and thought about the features we could see. We then took a tour of the school. The children visited lots of different areas including the library, the music room, the Mitchell Bailey building and our field. After their tours, we talked about the different areas and also about the people we met who work at the school and are here to help them.

We enjoyed another visit to the woodland area on Friday and played a scavenger hunt. The children had to find an interesting stick, two leaves that were different, something bumpy and something that they found beautiful. This activity is great to do on autumn walks.