A busy week in Reception!
This week we have been busy practising for our Christmas show. The children are doing really well learning lines, singing songs and moving about on and off the stage. Thank you for the costumes you have sent in. We are very excited for you to come and see our show!

This week in maths

In maths this week, we have been using our perceptual subitising skills (seeing the quantity without counting) in increasingly complex arrangements. We have been developing the skill of visualising, looking carefully at arrangements of dots, closing our eyes and describing what we saw. Using spatial language to describe sub-groups within these arrangements helps to deepen the children’s understanding of the numbers within numbers eg there are 2 at the bottom and 2 at the top and that makes 4 altogether. The children have also been using a number track to play dice-based games. Playing games with dice helps to consolidate the children’s understanding of the stable order of numbers and allow them to link the numbers on a track to the quantities on a die.

This Week in Talk for Writing
We have been reading the story Dear Zoo in Talk 4 Writing. The children have really enjoyed retelling this story using actions and then drawing their own story maps to help retell the story.

Next week

Next week in maths the children will continue to engage with activities that draw attention to the purpose of counting and will practice finding how many objects there are in a set. They will be revisiting the concept of cardinality – that the last number in the count tells us how many things there are altogether. The children will spend time next week discovering that each number has a value of 1 more than the previous number. Using blocks and squares to order quantities from 1 to 5 will help to embed this key understanding. The children will hear ordinal numbers (first, second, etc.) alongside these ordering activities and as part of classroom routines.

We will continue to retell the story next week and start writing our own versions of the story.

Reminders:

- Please ensure your child has a pair of wellies, waterproofs and warm winter clothing such as a hat and gloves so they are fully prepared for outdoor learning in all weather.

We hope you have a great weekend,

The Reception team