We have been busy bees in Reception today. Exploring, making new friends and physical fun Friday outside in the sun!
The children have settled into Year 1 wonderfully! We have already started our Learning Means The World Theme ‘ Happily Ever After’ in which we are researching fairy tales and their settings and characters. In our Maths we have been counting forwards and backwards and saying 1 more and 1 less than a given number. We are already learning so much and can’t wait to see what else we can do.
We have launched our first theme of the year, which is based all around COMMUNICATION. During assembly the children found out how meerkats communicate with each other. Did you know that they take it in turns to watch out for predators and when everything is ok they make a low constant peeping known as ‘The Watchman’s song’? If a predator is spotted the guard alerts the others with a bark or a whistle.
People have been communicating with each other throughout the whole of human history, but how we communicate with each other has changed massively over the last 30 years.
We are going to be investigating all sorts of weird and wonderful ways of communicating in our new theme.
This week in Maths 2 Red have been learning about position and direction. To get us started with some key vocabulary we followed the Cha Cha Slide. We then added extra vocabulary such as quarter, half and full turns, and clockwise and anticlockwise – connecting this all back to previous learning about time and fractions to help us. We had great fun writing instructions for our stick person, Robin, to them around our map ensuring we talked like true mathematicians!
This week in maths we have been looking at fractions of amounts and equivalent fractions. The children worked really hard to gain a clear understanding of fractions of amounts before moving on to more complex equivalent fractions.
As part of our Path to Success way of learning, the children ‘played’ with it today.
This week during our theme ‘What on earth?’ we have been looking at small things. Then Reception used the story ‘Little Red Hen’ to support some of our learning. We decided to make some bread, the smell of baking bread was amazing and it tasted delicious! We certainly have some contenders for Great British Bake Off!
This week in Year 1 we have been working hard to half both objects and quantities. We figured out that if we halved something it meant that we shared it between one other equally. We halved shapes, numbers of counters and sandwiches! We even ate both halves, I wonder what fraction that would make?
7 Red have been exploring multiplication and division.
We have enjoyed sharing ‘equally’ and we challenged ourselves to find different ways of creating equal groups.
Mrs McCarthy had 9p to share ….we worked out that it couldn’t be shared equally between 2 but could be shared equally between 3.
3 groups of 3p.
7 Red worked together to think of a challenge question:
“How many equal groups can you make out of 100?”
Last week we came into Nursery to find someone or something had left footprints on our floor. We looked at the clues and thought about what it could have been. It had big feet and sharp claws and it had brought leaves and branches through the nursery too. After some careful thought, we decided that it could have been a Gruffalo!
We have had lots of fun with our Gruffalo activities this week and last.
Some of the activities included;
- retelling the story in the tuff tray and with the story stones
- using our maths skills to order by size and recognise digits to 5
- role playing in the Gruffalo Café and home corner
- exploring habitats and animal homes
- creating natural art inspired by the Gruffalo
- heading out on a Gruffalo hunt in the garden
- making play-dough Gruffalos
- using shapes to make Gruffalo faces
Take a look at the photos to see what else we have been up to.
we have been up to.
We had so much fun yesterday in maths, we have been investigating measures. The children looked at what they could measure and how they could measure it. They also talked about the different abbreviations that they knew and new ones. Using different measuring equipment to measure items in the classroom.
