Summer 1 - Marvellous Minibeasts

Our topic this half term is ‘Marvellous Minibeasts.’ We are going to be exploring different types of minibeasts, and going into detail to learn about spiders, snails, caterpillars, worms – or whichever minibeasts fascinate us the most! We will enjoy minibeast hunts, investigating features of different minibeasts and their life cycles, and we may even be lucky enough to care for some minibeasts in our classrooms! 

Friday 28th May. This term we have been learning to throw underarm. We can aim at a target and use the same action when rolling a ball.

We are always showing our class value of Creativity, and being like Thinking Thib - which means we plan and make decisions about what we are going to do. Our new design sheets in our construction area have helped us to think of ideas! Super construction!

Thursday 27th May - This week, we have become minibeast inventors! We've used all of our minibeast knowledge from over the term to create our very own minibeasts! We have had butterbees, catbeeworms and many more. After drawing and labelling our inventions, we then used different materials to create them and then wrote care instructions about our minibeasts' habitats and diet. 

Wednesday 26th May - Today was our final PE session with our Athletics coach. We have really enjoyed our Athletics time, and learned so many new skills!

Wednesday 26th May - Money! We have been learning about money this week - identifying and using coins! We have been using the words "copper" and "silver" to identify coins, and remembering that 1p is the smallest copper coin. 

Friday 21st May - PSHE Rights and Responsibilities Day. We learned about what we are responsible for; such as our planet, our own words and actions and pets. We also learned what a right is, and what our rights are. We spoke about how important it is to respect other people's rights and be responsible ourselves. We made books for how to care for our planet, used old materials to recycle them into toys and continued to be responsible for our words and choices by being kind. With Mrs Govender, we enjoyed the story, "I Can Save the Earth!" and recycled paper towels to make our own monsters and to remind us to not waste things. 

Thursday 20th May - National Bee Day! We celebrated with our own Minibeast Day in RZ! We received a letter from someone called Bob - he wanted to get rid of ALL the bees! We needed to tell him why bees are so important! We wrote about how they help plants to grow and make honey! We tried tasting some yummy honey, and we also did a science experiment to understand how bees pollinate flowers. A very busy day - so much so that we didn't quite manage to get a photo of every child in their lovely costumes, but Thank you for the wonderful effort made! 

Tuesday 18th May - Shape, shape, shape! We have been learning about 2D and 3D shape - identifying them and learning that different examples of the same shape are not always the same size or orientation.

I can't believe we are coming close to the final half-term of Reception! We are always SO proud of the children. 

Wednesday 12th May - We have really been enjoying our "Busy Bee" time! The special busy bees come into our classroom. We all have our own nests and we get busy in our nests doing different Reading and Writing activities. The busy bees are always so impressed with us!

Tuesday 11th May - Yesterday, we arrived to school to discover a spider has landed in our classroom! The children were very excited! We went on to read "The Very Busy Spider." Throughout the week, we will practise retelling the story before innovating the setting. There has been some super retelling already!

Tuesday 11th May - Today we learned about the Islam celebration of Eid-ul-Fitr. We learned about what the celebration means to Muslims, and how it is celebrated. We then enjoyed lots of different Eid-themed activities throughout the afternoon - creating our own feast in the home corner, discussing how Muslims pray, creating Eid pictures and designing Mehndi hand designs. The children enjoyed watching a video from our Pendle Faith Ambassadors which helped us learn more about the celebration.

Monday 10th May - Our Maths focus this week is Volume and Capacity. We've started off by learning about volume and using special vocabulary like "full" "empty" "nearly" "half" to describe the volume in different containers. We've enjoyed lots of different opportunities to show off our fantastic understanding of volume using water and rice. 

Monday 10th May - This week, in RE, we have been learning about how Christian people show belonging to Christianity. We looked at a selection of pictures and decided whether that was a sign of belonging. We noticed that many signs of belonging included the cross.

Thursday 6th May - We have been very busy this week working hard to retell the story, "Snail Trail" by Ruth Brown, using a story map. We then innovated the story and chose a new location for the snail to travel to, and wrote this in our writing books. Children took turns on the iPad to film each other retelling the poem!

Wednesday 5th May - We've been using oil pastels to create our own snail spiral drawings! It was great to be outdoors in the sunshine whilst doing our artwork!

Tuesday 4th May - Snails! With the arrival of a silvery trail and snails in our classroom this week, we are all very enthusiastic about all things snails! The children have enjoyed and created lots of different snail-themed learning across the classroom and outside, and have told me many wonderful snail facts - "Did you know... snails are herbivores! That's why they're eating those yummy vegetables."

Tuesday 26th April - Our art skill this week was folding. I left out a mixture of materials for the children to explore which fold the best and springiest. This was something we discussed as we learned about frogs - "They have springy legs!" We applied our folding skills to create springy frogs - we used card as this was the springiest material. We also folded card for the frogs tongues - "Their tongues are really long so they can stretch and catch the flies and dragonflies!"  Some children decided to practise their folding skills to make my cat, Casper some toys this week! He was very grateful for his new toys!

Friday 23rd April. We looked for worms and worked together to set up our own wormery.

Wednesday 21st April - Our new class pets! One of our RZ friends kindly brought some tadpoles in from their pond. We are so excited to have some tadpoles to care for. We have been observing what they look like and what they do. At the moment, they are very small and spend lots of time swimming around their pond water and eating their pond weed. We are excited to learn more about tadpoles over the coming weeks. 

Wednesday 21st April - We have been enjoying our Athletics sessions. Last week, we practised different ways to run (jogging and sprinting). This week, we practised jumping and learned how important it is to think about what our hands and feet are doing whilst we jump. 

Monday 19th April - This week, we are retelling in innovating a poem called "Jump or Jiggle." Once listening to the poem, we noticed it is all about how different animals move and that it rhymed. We made our own poem map to retell the poem, and lots of us had a go at retelling it on our own during choice time! Super!

Monday 19th April - For our RE/UTW focus, we have been talking about different groups we belong to, and how we feel to be a part of those groups. Miss Zak shared some photos of the groups she was in when she was younger! We then drew a picture on our whiteboards of a group we enjoy being a part of, and spoke about who else was in that group with us. This ranged from cricket groups, swimming groups and ballet groups to our family groups! We also thought about what clothes we wear to show we are part of that group. Next week, we will move onto think about different religious groups. 

Friday 16th April - This term, our ICT focus is Coding. We loved being back with Miss Bowden and showing off our fantastic skills on the computers.

Thursday 15th April - Following on from our fascination for dragonflies and their rainbow wings, we have been painting our own dragonflies! However, we were only given the 3 primary colours - red, blue and yellow. Our challenge was to explore and mix the colours to create rainbow wings for our dragonflies. 

Thursday 15th April - We've had a super week going minibeast-mad! We have all shown excellent enthusiasm and asked some fantastic questions to start off our minibeast topic - Do worms have a skull? Can minibeasts live under water? We have developed lots of different skills whilst enjoying a variety of minibeast tasks. We've had bug soup, super minibeast loose parts and some fantastic minibeast habitats!