Spring 1 Week 1 10.1.25
Hello!
We hope you all had a lovely Christmas. The children have settled really well back into the new term, despite the incredibly cold weather we have had this week. The children have been great at independently getting changed and unchanged out of their outdoor gear and we have enjoyed some time in the crunchy snow.
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 the children have been learning about different materials that can be recycled and where to put items that can be recycled. In class, they have been sorting out rubbish into plastic, paper and card and metal. We have been discussing ways of helping to reduce the things we throw away; the children came up with some super ideas such as donating items to charity, drinking from reusable cups and bottles, turning the lights off and other household equipment and taking unused food to a food bank. At home you could discuss all the ways you recycle items in your household. We have also learned about pollution, what it means, different types of pollution and how we can help. Here is a link to a song we sang in class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nvSMoYRi6Q
We have been reading the story ‘Somebody Swallowed Stanley’ which is about a plastic bag which ends up in the ocean and causes danger to some sea creatures. (Don’t worry: there’s a happy ending!) Here is a link to a reading of the story if you would like to enjoy this together at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6CBMENGAo0
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 be reading and learning the story Little Red Hen next week in our Talk 4 Writing unit. The children will be learning the story off by heart, using actions to help them to retell the narrative. They will be drawing story maps to create a visual representation of the story which will aid an oral retelling, leading into writing in the second week of this unit.
We hope you have a lovely weekend.
The Reception team
