Year R
Where do you live?
We have enjoyed finding out about where we live by going for a walk in our local area. We spotted lots of signs and learnt about important buildings in our community, such as the library, doctors surgery and church.
We created maps to talk about the familiar places near our school. We used positional language to describe how to get there and also discussed our own experiences. We wrote sentences about what the different buildings are used for using phonetic sounds.
Look at our paintings of what we saw in Lordshill. We looked very closely at different shapes, symbols and patterns.
Handa's Suprise
Year R have enjoyed our ‘Around the World’ topic, starting with Africa.
We started the week by watching the teachers act out the story of Handa’s Surprise. We have enjoyed writing about the story and helping Handa to solve some tricky maths problems in our adult directed learning. During our self-initiated play we have engaged in making baskets for Handa’s fruit using magnetic shapes, comparing her house with our own and using our senses to explore different types of fruit.
Explore Maths with The Gruffalo
The children in Year R were motivated to create some special crumble for the Gruffalo using natural objects. They made decisions about what to put in the crumble and how many of each object to put in. The children engaged in making sets, finding the number card to match and were even challenged to talk about who had more or less and what 1 more or 2 more would be.
"I have more because I have 4 and she has 2. 4 is more than 2." - Lucas
“I’m going to put in twigs.. 10.” Lloyd carefully counts out 10 twigs to make a set. What would 1 more be? (Adult) “8” How could you check that? (Adult) Lloyd adds 1 more to his pile and touch counts accurately to 11. “It’s 11!” What is one more than 11? (Adult) Lloyd counts his twigs to 11 and counts on one more, “12!”
“I’m going to put in 5 conkers.” What’s 1 more? (Adult) “6”. What would 2 more than 6 be? (Adult) Amelia thinks and then decides to use the objects to help her, “I’m going to count. I’m going to put one more in to make 6 and then 2 more. Oh, that makes 8!”
“I’m going to put in 3 stones.” Harry makes a set of 3. What would 2 more be? (Adult) “5” How do you know? (Adult) Harry shows me on his fingers “I had 3 (showing 3 fingers) and then 4, 5, makes 5.” Harry continues to add more stones, investigating what would happen and then matches number cards to his sets.
Dinosaur Dig
Year R have had lots of fun learning about dinosaurs. We have been very busy finding out and writing interesting dinosaur facts. We learnt about different types of dinosaurs and sorted what they would eat if they were a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore.
We are getting very clever at estimating numbers. We had a good guess at how many little dinosaurs we had and checked how close we were by touch counting. We then made our own dinosaur foot prints and estimated how many objects would fit on them too.
We really enjoyed exploring dinosaur skeletons, bones and fossils. We looked very closely and found lots of differences and similarities between them.
Year R have blasted off with lots of learning all about space.
To kick start our topic, we completed a home learning project all about astronauts, rockets and the solar system. This meant that we knew lots of facts to share with our friends. A big thank you to our grown-ups for helping us.
Year R know lots of letters and sounds now. We applied our learning to imagine and write what we think we might see outside the window of a rocket. What do you think you might see?
Phonics has also helped our reading. We made our own space sentences and sounded them out. It was a bit tricky to pinch the word stars with rubber gloves and tweezers, but it helped us to practise our fine motor skills too!
We enjoyed being creative in different ways. Do you like our chalk pictures and our rockets made from recyclable materials?
Autumn
Room on the Broom
Year R have been learning through the story of Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson.
We love learning phonics. Phonics helps us to read and write. Look at the writing we have done using our sounds.
We helped the witch to count objects by touch counting. We wrote a number to label how many objects there were. If we found it tricky, we solved the problem by using number cards to help us.
Do you like our witch pictures? We made them using 2D shapes. Our challenge was to describe the shapes with words like straight sides and pointy corners. We even had a go at labelling them!
The witch had lots of pumpkins for Harvest. We helped her to measure and weigh ingredients to make delicious pumpkin soup and bread! We then had a pumpkin picnic with our friends to drink our soup and look for signs of Autumn. We found the leaves had fallen from the trees and turned crispy and colourful. What colour leaves can you find?
We love gardening
We love gardening in Year R and have been learning lots about plants and talking about the changes that occur as they grow. We took good care of our seeds and made sure that they had lots of water and sunshine. Now we have grown lots of colourful flowers and delicious fruits and vegetables. We carefully picked and washed the sugar snap peas and juicy strawberries. Look what we found inside the sugar snap pods! Our friends enjoyed sharing them with us, they were gobbled up very quickly! Now we’re waiting for the green tomatoes to ripen and turn red before we can eat them up too! What do you think we should grow next?
Superheroes and Winter Wonderland.
Year R have been very busy this term! Our topics have been Superheroes and Winter Wonderland.
In our superhero topic, we have been super mathematicians and have been practising our number recognition and ordering to 10, 20 and beyond! We also turned into superheroes for the day to raise money for Children in Need. We had to think of our own superhero name and power and we wrote it down using our phonics. Some of us typed our name using a computer. We have also been artists and painted pop art in the style of Roy Lichtenstein. We used lots of different tools and materials to make interesting prints.
Our next topic was Winter Wonderland. We have enjoyed labelling and writing sentences about characters from Frozen. We are beginning to remember to use finger spaces and a full stop! We also built our own snowman using 2D shapes and labelled the shapes that we know.
Spring Term
Our topics so far have been The Gingerbread Man and Countries-Around the World.
All the children were very lucky and excited because they watched the play of the Gingerbread Man! They all joined in especially when the actors shouted ‘Run, run as fast as you can! You can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man’. We then chose to do our own performance and problem solved by planning ways to get the Gingerbread Man across the river! The children planned and wrote their own story based on the traditional tale of the Gingerbread Man. They had lots of fun learning about story words.
Our next topic was Around the World and we started off by going on a pretend visit to France! Children went on the Eurostar train and arrived in a French Café. They all tasted some French food and drank delicious hot chocolate. We then learnt about China and celebrated Chinese New Year. We decorated our classroom doors with all the special things we made. We enjoyed seeing lots of special Chinese artefacts. We also found out about Poland and made sweets to celebrate an important Polish Festival. Next we are learning about Italy we are looking forwarding to making pizza and learning about halves in mathematics.
