Hello!

Welcome back after the Easter break, we hope you had the opportunity to spend time together and have fun! The children have had a good start to the summer term, returning to school with fantastic learning attitudes.

This week the children have been working hard in their phonics groups. Thank you for your continued support in your child’s phonics journey, listening to them read and helping them to practise sounds and red words. In our morning work, we have a picture of the day which the children write about. We have been so impressed with the children’s independent writing and how confident they are becoming in using the sounds they have learnt to write new words and sentences. They are also engaging in writing in provision, writing about silly pictures, labelling their drawings and writing short stories!

In maths, we have started our topic ‘To 20 and beyond’. This week we have been learning how to build numbers beyond 10. The children have explored number patterns from 11-20, they have been matching numerals and pictorials and they have used a range of resources including numicon and ten frames to make up teen numbers. The children have identified that the 1 in a teen number represents 10. We have discussed that a teen number is made of 1 ten and some more, for example 14 is 1 ten and 4 ones. At home, you can support this learning by practising counting to 20, recognising numbers on walks or at home and counting objects such as sweets or pebbles. You could organise items such as sweets into a group of 10 and then another group to represent the ones. Encourage your child to count on from 10 when counting up the items.

In understanding the world, we have had lots of fun learning about plants. We have learnt that a plant is a living organism and have learnt the names of the parts of a plant. We have identified plants in the school garden and the children took photos using iPads of what they found. We have been learning about what plants need to grow and have we up an experiment which we will be observing over the next few weeks.

Next week, we will continue with our maths topic ‘To 20 and beyond’, building teen numbers, recognising numerals and pictorials and exploring patterns in number.

Next week we will be reading and learning the story 'Jasper's Beanstalk' in our new Talk 4 Writing unit.  We will be reading the story, adding actions to help us to retell the story, creating story maps and then using these to retell the story orally. 

We hope you have a lovely weekend,

The Reception team