Reception Spotlight - Spring Term

What a busy and jam packed term we have had in Reception!

In Spring Term 1, our topic was called ‘People Who Help Us!’ We kick started this topic by learning all about the people in our school who help us. Each class visited a mystery person in the school (Mr Myers, Mrs Kennett & Miss Granelli and Mr Hennessy) to find out what they do in the school and how it helps us. We then moved onto the Emergency Services with a visit from Police Officers from our local Police station and a Paediatric Nurse from St Helier Hospital. We found out lots of important information about their jobs and saw some of the equipment they use. We even sat in a Police Car and try on some pieces of police uniform. Wow! We ended our topic by learning about a variety of other people who help us in our local community including people who help us at night when we are asleep. We read the story ‘All Through the Night’ by Polly Faber.

During Spring Term 1, we also celebrated National Storytelling Week and completed a variety of different activities about The Gingerbread Man. It was so much fun!

In Spring Term 2, our topic was ‘What a Wonderful World!’ We started this topic with the help of Google Earth finding out all about where we live! We were fascinated to see our school on Google Earth and loved looking at different places of interest in our local community. Learning about and using maps was a big focus for us. We created our own maps learning all about a ‘Birds Eye View’ and we used maps to look for clues/rewards around our school. A big part of this term has also been celebrating special events such as Pancake Day, World Book Day and STEM Week! We absolutely loved having visitors into our classrooms for STEM Week and we were fascinated by their job roles. I think we were definitely inspired to become engineers from these visits. We had a science day full of science experiments and activities and working with Year 4 on the IPads for technology day was really useful.

We loved welcoming our families into Reception for our ‘Mothers & Others Day’ and we think they thoroughly enjoyed our special gifts and song we sang for them. What another busy term!

Every morning, we have continued to impress our teachers with our fantastic phonics! “Phonics helps us to read and to write!” This term we have learnt; 14 digraphs and trigraphs, 9 new tricky words, and we are now reading words not only containing these digraphs and trigraphs, but also longer words where we need to ‘chunk it up!’. We have continued with our ‘Let’s Read’ sessions in the mornings and have thoroughly enjoyed becoming more independent and fluent readers. There is a real buzz in the classroom seeing all of the children developing their love for reading!

In maths, we have been very busy continuing to develop our subitising skills. Remember ‘don’t count, say the amount!’ We have also been developing a deeper number sense by finding 1 more and 1 less, calculating doubles and finding halves of a shape and of a number.

In our PE lessons we have been working on our gymnastic skills in Spring 1 and our Dance skills in Spring 2. Developing our coordination skills to create different gymnastic movements was a little difficult at first, but with lots of practise, we got there! We have loved our dance lessons. We have been learning basic samba moves from Brazil and also basic Charleston steps from the roaring 1920’s!

We have had a fantastic Spring Term in Reception and seeing the children continuing to grow and develop as learners has been amazing!