Autumn 2022

We're Going on a Bear Hunt
 
Reception loved exploring the amazing Micheal Rosen classic story, 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. They really enjoyed learning using a story map that we created together. All of the children were able to follow the map and do the actions for each part of the story and could recite all of it off by heart. We learnt about 'settings' in a story and came up with our own describing words to describe what the forest might be like. Reception went on a 'story walk' around the school to experience what it may have felt like to walk through 'long, wavy grass' and 'a swirling, whirling snow storm.' Making the 'narrow, gloomy caves' out of blankets in the classroom was our favourite part! 
Chinese New Year
 
Reception enjoyed our topic, 'Fireworks'. We explored the world festival of 'Chinese New Year'. We enjoyed listening to some traditional chinese music, watching and learning some 'dragon dances' and trying to use chop sticks! In literacy, we had a go at writing the initial sounds in some firework-themed vocabulary. We did it all on our own too! 
At the end of our topic, we revisited 'Chinese New Year' and we listened to the story of the Chinese Zodiac. We used our new phonics skills of 'fred fingers' to say the word and pinch the sounds to write some CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words that were the names of some of the animals from the story.
Maths: Long and Short
 
We have been exploring length in Maths and have been introduced the the vocabulary; long, short, longer, shorter, longest, shortest. One of our math challenges was to make some playdough baguettes for the teddy bears on their picnic. The longest one for the biggest bear and the shortest one for the smallest bear. 
We then put our new learning into practice during 'choosing time' where we explored the lengths of different snakes on the playdough mats and discussed what we could see with our friends using the new vocabulary that we had learnt.